Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Tue, May 04, 2010
Inbound marketing can consist of a simple SEO project or a more complete picture using SEO, blog & social media development with the appropriate analytics.
When analyzing and evaluating the Internet marketing needs of any business, it's important to understand that one size does not fit all. Each business will have different objectives, different budgets and therefore demand different and flexible solutions.
It is also important for businesses to realize that as Internet marketing or inbound marketing become more of a primary marketing mechanism, its important to apply the appropriate attention, budget and changes required to generate the return on investment that is, in most cases, the main objective. Understand that inbound marketing is now more efficient, more effective and more measurable than the way marketing has been implemented over the past 40 years (outbound marketing).
With this in mind, one of the decisions you will need to consider is the choice between PPC (sponsored ads) or a natural or organic search engine strategy. Although both can be beneficial, they do serve different objectives and need careful consideration before launch. Below are some basics that need to be understood in order to make an educated decision.
Any business and Internet marketing plan can benefit from both PPC or SEO so...
- Where do you start?
- Is it a sponsored ad campaign or organic search engine optimization?
- Both are important so what where should I start or would be the right mix?
- How do I determine what my budget should be?
- How much should I spend on PPC and how much on SEO?
- Which one has the higher rate of success?
- Which one is easy to manage?
Many of these questions are asked by business owners while developing their online marketing strategies or working with an Internet marketing expert on consulting firm.
One of the first steps should be a basic understand of the differences between the two. Here is a simple explanation:
The standard industry term is PPC, which means "par per click". You pay search engines or any other publisher for the clicks you get on your advertisement links. Another way to explain this; the traffic you are getting is Paid Traffic through the creation and placement of your advertisement. The alternative is SEO or search engine optimization. SEO is where you work on your web pages to improve its natural rankings in the major Search engines for the selected (important) keywords. If done correctly the result is free traffic for your website. This doesn't mean the process of organic optimization is free. If you have the skills and time, it will be free but you may need to pay a specialists to perform these activities.
These are some Pros and Cons of both PPC and Organic SEO as part of an overall inbound marketing plan.
If you have a newer site and need some faster exposure, PPC Campaigns can give you these quick results. You can launch your projects within hours and start getting search engine (or Facebook & LinkedIn) placement and traffic on your website over night. Pay per click programs are easy to monitor and lets you do specific testing and experimenting. This method will provide you with a detailed analysis of important metrics like:
- How many times your ad had been displayed
- How many people clicked on them
- Which ad got maximum clicks
- What is the conversion rate
Sponsored ad campaigns are also easy to control. You can control the placement of your listings and location where you want your ad to show, and stop your project anytime you want.
PPC campaigns are also very effective to test the impact of changes in site architecture on conversion rate.
PPC campaigns are great if you are going to promote some seasonal items and when it is not feasible to wait for improvement in organic rankings.
Cons - PPC campaigns, in most cases don’t have long term value. Your listings will disappear from search engines and other networks if you stop spending money. Usually a larger budget is needed to run an effective PPC campaign. If your niche is highly competitive and you are competing against big brands, this is even more true. In my opinion, the biggest reason to be careful when utilizing a sponsored ad campaign is because PPC ads get only 10% of click throughs when compared to organic search rankings.
Search Engine Optimization
Pros - Natural Search results get 90% of the activity on a search engine results page. This means you can get much more traffic if you can get top positions in organic results.
You don’t have to pay for extra traffic you get due to improvement of your website rankings in organic search results.
You can stop your SEO (search engine optimization) and link building campaigns for few months once your rankings become stable in Search results and can enjoy free traffic.
Proper SEO and Link Building will help you to increase the overall authority of your website.
Cons - SEO and Link Building is a time consuming process. It usually takes 6-8 months or even more to achieve the top results in organic rankings depending on the quality of your website and competition in your niche.
No control on the Rankings of website and no guarantee of results because organic results are very unpredictable.
As you have now seen the pros and cons of both marketing strategies, the selection of the SEO or PPC depends on the purpose of your inbound marketing campaign. If you are looking for quick exposure for your new business then PPC campaign is your best option but if you are looking for long term solution then focus on your SEO and link building campaigns. Business owners need to maintain a proper balance between their SEO and PPC activities. While, money spent on SEO should be considered as long term investment for your business, PPC campaigns should be used only to fill out the gaps which cannot be achieved with SEO like running ads on content networks, for doing research of proper keywords or to test the new design of website.
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Thu, Apr 15, 2010
Internet Business Goals for Today. Find An Inbound Marketing Partner Company That Provides A Complete Menu of Software & Services.
For many professionals and businesses I speak with, it's apparent that the time has arrived to crank up their web presence.
Whether you are thinking about creating a profitable web site or are already there, but need expert guidance, you need to either hire professionals in house or found a real partner and establish an alliance. Hopefully you will consider this inbound marketing blog as your first step (and maybe your last) in that search.
The next step in developing better Internet presence is defining a set ofobjectives recommendations, suggestions or even proposals that is focused on a specific plan of attack, with the goal of gaining a foothold in your marketplace using all the tools that the Internet offers. For a better understanding of inbound marketing, please download our free white paper.
There are many alliances and inbound marketing partners you can choose from but do the research thoroughly. The right partner should help you decide where to go next and how to get there most efficiently, so you can get the highest return on investment and hard work. The right inbound marketing partner should come with software solutions that tie in all the elements of successful inbound marketing. These would include:
- An appropriate content management component (CMS)
- A strong keyword development application
- An efficient method to optimize all pages
- An efficient method to create new landing pages
- A mechanism to connect & update your social media accounts
- An application to develop consistent blog posts
- Most important: A complete application to analyze all activity and production
A great place to start your own education is by evaluation your web site through the eyes of the searching world by using HubSpot's Website Grader. Less than 5% of the companies that are online today actually understand and measure their marketing success when evaluating their Internet marketing properties.
A web-driven business is sometimes called ”click-and-mortar" and when it comes to supporting resources, is no different than a physical site or brick-and-mortar business. They both require creative planning, concentrated marketing and a commitment and initiative to succeed. This process of inbound marketing for success starts at the foundation of your business in the form of a master keyword inventory. This can also be described as your target market and competition analysis. Without an accurate keyword analysis and inventory, the efforts and dollars that follow could become a large spinning wheel on a treadmill.
In pursuing this path it takes the knowledge, experience and resources that a top tier Internet marketing partner can offer and help you make the proper decisions that are to take you and your company into the future of Internet-based business.
Make sure team you select can show you how to unlock the full potential of your business on the world wide web. They will need to learn about your business objectives and web potential, then construct a web marketing plan that helps boost your bottom line with little cost producing a tangible method to measure ROI (return on investment).
If you already have a web site, the goal would be to enhance it’s potential to drive traffic, then leads then sales and bring new customers, while strengthening relationships with current ones. Hold your newly selected team accountable and evaluate them directly with the growth of your business. The obvious objective is to make more money and increase productivity. Be sure your inbound marketing support team provides you with, and access to success reports and ongoing strategic planning for continued acceleration and market penetration.
Our recommendation is to combine a comprehensive web site promotion software solution to handle all necessary elements of powerful inbound marketing under one roof with a capable and proven team to utilize this resource.
Below is an example of a real time search engine ranking report that should be created for both initial planning and ongoing evaluations.
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Mon, Apr 12, 2010
How To Get Found Online: Search Engines Presence
As I normally state in these Inbound Marketing blog posts, the information below was created for businesses & professionals looking for inbound marketing strategies. Inbound marketing professionals should already be familiar with this information but I do encourage marketing professionals to share this blog post with their readers.
There are generally two forms of search engine results:
1. Sponsored or paid results
2. Organic or natural results.
Sponsored Results: Paid search engine results (sponsored results) are those listings that require a fee for the search engines to list their link for specific, selected keywords or keyphrases. The most widely used form of paid listing is Pay Per Click (PPC). This is where you pay each time someone clicks on the link in your advertisement on the search engine results page (SERP). The price increases with the level of competition of the selected keyword.
Organic Results: Natural or organic search results are gathered by search engines’ web crawlers and ranked according to relevance to search terms. This relevance is calculated by criteria such as:
• Extent of keyword match
• Keyword prominence
• Keyword frequency
• Keyword relevance
• Number of links into that website or web page
Ranking in the organic search results is better because not only is it FREE, but research shows that people click on the organic results 75% to 84% of the time and paid results only garnish 16% to 25% of the attention. Part of the reason for this is that consumers are intelligent enough to understand that money alone can get a web site to the top of a page through these sponsored ad purchases but organic results are dictated by the direct relevance as determined by Google or the other major search engines. This gives organic search results and those web sites that achieve these results much more credibility.
How Do The Major Search Engines Decide Page 1 Rankings?
Google and the other major search engines rank websites in search engine results pages according to relevance to the search terms. This relevance is calculated by looking at both on-page factors such as the content on your site and off-page factors in the form of inbound links to your website. Off-page factors (number of links to a given web page or web site) are the biggest influences in your website’s ranking in search engine results. With these factors as the primary influence, any web site with inbound marketing as a priority, needs to learn how to do some or all of the following:
1: Research & Develop Master Keyword Inventory
• Search Volume – Given two different keyword phrases, optimize for the one with the larger number of searches.
• Relevance – Choose keywords that your target market is using to describe and search for your products and services.
• Difficulty or Competition – Consider your chances for ranking on the first page of Google for that keyword phrase. Look at the sites ranked in those first 10 slots, their authority and relevance to search terms, and gage if you will be able to overtake them to secure a spot on that first page.
2: On-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Place keywords in the page title, URL, headings, and page text.
• Optimize your page description for maximum click-through-rate when your site ranks in Google searches.
• Place keywords in other “invisible” places on your web site, including meta-keyword tags and alt-text on images.
3: Off-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Build more inbound links from other sites into yours. Each link serves as a recommendation or a reference.
• Build more links within context, i.e. those with valuable keywords in the link anchor text (the text that is hyperlinked to your site). Link anchor text provides context for the search engines to understand what your site is about.
• Build more links from trusted websites. Just as references from well-respected friends and experts offer more value, so do links from trusted and well- respected websites.
• Link-building tips:
o Submit your website to directories like the Yahoo! Directory and Business.com
o Communicate with others in your industry through blogs and other social media
o Create compelling tools (such as an interesting calculator) and content (via a blog, for example)
4: Measure, Evaluate, Analyze & Modify
• Track number of inbound links, keyword rank over time and compared to competition.
• Measure real business results: number of visitors, leads, and customers from SEO.
Below is an example of search engine ranking results produced for my company. This is some of the data I use to help understand my inbound marketing productivity.
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Wed, Mar 24, 2010
This is part 2 in a series of blogs started earlier this week so if you enjoy this blog on lead generation: what are other businesses doing?, please scroll down to read part one.
The question being asked to each every business I speak with is this: Would you explain what your business is doing to develop your lead generation efforts and how Inbound marketing plays a role in your lead generation, tracking and lead nurturing?
Today's blog features: The Corporate Sedan Service
Business Name: The Corporate Sedan Service
Business Web Site: www.philadelphia-limo-services.com
Business Location: Philadelphia, PA
Marketing Decision Maker: Gregg Fox
Business Description: Ground Transportation
What are your current marketing activities: Yellow pages, Philadelphia convention & Visitors Guide, SEO, Blog, Social Media
What is your primary marketing method?: Internet marketing
What changes are needed (if any) in your marketing methods?: Most of the important changes were made over 1st quarter of this year. Last year I ran a pretty aggressive search engine optimization program. This year I see the need to expand into more complete online marketing so I hired a professional who manages a more comprehensive system.
Do you know what Inbound Marketing is, if so, please define in your own words?: Yes - Inbound marketing uses a more friendly way to get my message out. Compared to the old way, it doesn't involve interrupting people with my message, it just makes it more available when they are search for related information. It includes a well optimized web site, an active blog and as much social media as I can support.
What percentage of your marketing budget is applied to Outbound marketing vs. Inbound marketing? Last year it was around 60% but this year is close to 90%.
What inbound marketing components are you currently utilizing?: Web site development and optimization, blog post creation, Twitter, Facebook and Linked In status updates, email marketing, lead tracking and nurturing
How are you currently measuring ROI?: I am using an Inbound Marketing software application to generate, track, nurture all leads and ROI. I am still setting up systems because I have to bridge a gap between my web site and a separate reservation system.
Have you ever executed a keyword development strategy for your web site?: Yes, as part of my new inbound marketing application.
How are you measuring your web site's traffic?: Yes, Same answer as above
How are you measuring your web site's conversations?: Yes, Same answer as above
What search engine strategy has been employed?: A complete plan starting with a keyword analysis and research, then optimizing each page based on those results.
Are you using a blog? If so, how often are you posting a new article?: Yes but it's brand new
Who creates each blog article?: Myself but I plan on training others in my office to contribute.
Does your business have a Linked In account?: Yes
Does your business have a Twitter account?: Yes
Does your business have a Facebook account?: Yes, and a fan page
How would you define your lead generation system?: I consider my new inbound marketing application a comprehensive lead generation system.
How would you define your lead tracking system?: Basically, same as above but still working out the kinks and other obstacles.
How would you define your lead nurturing systems?: I am creating an autoresponder
Have you considered developing an Inbound Marketing Plan, if so, what are your challenges?: Yes, my biggest challenge is education. Learning more about the resources within my new system so I can use them in the most efficient way..
On a scale of 1-10, how important is developing a focused inbound marketing program?: 9
How soon do you plan on developing a better inbound marketing plan?: N/A
What would be your first step in creating a better inbound marketing plan?: Optimizing our web site.
Next blog and business interview will be Friday, March 26th, 2010.
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Mon, Mar 22, 2010
Part 1: Inbound Marketing vs. SEO vs. Just Using A Web Site
Learn from what others are doing (& not doing).
Today's blog is part 1 in a new series of blogs created to help all business and business professionals understand what others are doing in reaction to all the new Inbound Marketing technologies & lead generation software available.
As an Inbound Marketing Consultant I have learned the biggest challenge for business, developing various inbound marketing applications, maybe to much information resulting in confusion. Inbound marketing is such a new and quickly developing marketing solution that many businesses know they need to get involved but don't fully understand all the options and methods. This translates to a lot of trial and error situations that many times end in frustration. As I speak to more and more business needing and wanting inbound marketing solutions, I hear the same type of questions:
- Do I need to redo my web site?
- What condition is my current web site in now?
- Do I need SEO - What is SEO?
- Do I need SEM - What is SEM ?
- How do I isolate my best keywords?
- How often should I blog?
- How long should my blog be?
- How does video work in a blog?
- What should I blog about?
- Should my blog be under my main URL?
- How can this social media craze help me - where do I start?
- Are my current social media efforts efficient and/or effective?
- Will Twitter really help?
- Should I use Facebook or Linked In?
- How do inbound links work and how do I get more?
- What is the difference between impressions, traffic, leads?
- What is a landing page and how do I use it to my advantage?
- How do I generate more leads?
- How do I track leads?
- How do I nurture leads?
- How do I find time to do all of this?
- Why can't I just use what I am used to, it's worked in the past?
- Doesn't my web master handle of of this?
If you're an Inbound Marketing Consultant, you have heard all these questions in one form or another. If you are a business owner, marketing director or other business professionals you probably have asked many (if not all) of these questions in one form or another.
My short answer to these questions are:
- Take a deep breath and relax a moment.
- Understand that each Inbound Marketing plan will be different because each target marketing is different.
- Make sure you get a clear picture (inbound marketing analysis) of where you are starting from or continuing from.
- Speak with a few Inbound Marketing Consultants in an effort to find one you trust. Find one that gives you a reason to be confident in his/her knowledge and specific solutions.
- Look for a method that is comprehensive and easily manageable under a few or even one application.
In an effort to shed some more light on both sides of this equation, I have taken the time to sit down and speak with business owners of all types and ask them what they are doing, what they believe, what they are concerned about, and what they would like to do going forward in the world of Inbound Marketing.
As stated earlier in this blog, this is "part 1" in a new series. Each new blog in this series will have the results of a new interview with a different business. These interviews consist of general questions, the subject's responses to those questions and some suggestions to resolve the obvious obstacles and challenges.
My hope is that this open communication will help business owners understand more about what is needed and the Inbound Marketing Industry will be better equipped to address these needs as they are stated from the client's point of view.
Interview #1:
Featured Business Name: Pain Medicine Associates
Business Web Site: www.painmedicineassociates.net
Business Location: Sarasota Florida
Marketing Decision Maker: Rosana Anatra
Business Description: Medical Office with 15 professionals with focus on pain management.
Overall Assessment: As I stated earlier, all businesses are unique and demand a unique approach to developing an inbound marketing startegy that works best. In this case, no real Inbound Marketing strategy has been developed. You can see by the answers below that this business does understand the importantce of marketing but feels they have success using a more traditional methods. After an initial conversation, PMA understands that they are ready to upgrade at least their representation and image online by creating a new web site. Once this is finished, they will slowly and systematically apply more inbound marketing elements. After this interview I can see that this business is different than many others in that they were not effected as greatly by the economic downturn. Their revenues have contionued to increase in 2009 and 2010. What I did notice was that even though they are taking in new business and growing each month, they are starting to understand the future and what technologies may help them support their future growth and marketing management.
Interview:
How would you describe your current marketing activities: Peer to peer communication, yellow pages, Physicians Guide (annual publication), networking with other physicians.
What is your primary marketing method?: Peer to peer communication
What changes are needed (if any) in your marketing methods?: More frequent marketing, diversify marketing efforts, the addition of some form of Internet marketing.
Do you know what Inbound Marketing is, if so, please define in your own words?: Yes - You bolster your internet presence in an effort to become more visible online and reach out to your target marketing in a non-invasive market responsive way so that they can reach you as their needs dictate.
What percentage of your marketing budget is applied to Outbound marketing vs. Inbound marketing? 50% - Our efforts are shiftly from focus on print to other types that are web site driven.
What inbound marketing components are you currently utilizing?: Web site development. Our web site is being recreated.
How are you currently measuring ROI?: Detailed analysis of new patients and their referral sources through traditional methods measurement.
Have you ever executed a keyword development strategy for your web site?: No
How are you measuring your web site's traffic?: Not
How are you measuring your web site's conversations?: Not
What search engine strategy has been employed?: Limited SEO with no real results, we think.
Are you using a blog? If so, how often are you posting a new article?: No
Who creates each blog article?: Nobody
Does your business have a Linked In account?: No
Does your business have a Twitter account?: No
Does your business have a Facebook account?: No
How would you define your lead generation system?: Don't really have one
How would you define your lead tracking system?: Old fashion paper system
How would you define your lead nurturing systems?: Thank you cards, phone follow up, written follow up, updating referring physicians
Have you considered developing an Inbound Marketing Plan, if so, what are your challenges?: Yes, enough time to create, budget and a better understanding of what we should do first.
On a scale of 1-10, how important is developing a focused inbound marketing program?: 4
How soon do you plan on developing a better inbound marketing plan?: within 24 to 36 months
What would be your first step in creating a better inbound marketing plan?: completing and then optimizing our web site.
Stay tuned for Part 2 In this blog series with Inbound marketing perspectives from other businesses.
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Fri, Mar 19, 2010
What is Inbound Marketing?
I understand the answer to this question may be obvious to most readers because most readers of this blog are in the Inbound Marketing Industry. However, for the purpose of educating all others who may be exposed to my blog, I offer the following explanations:
Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing
Definition of Inbound Marketing (wikipedia):
Inbound marketing is a style of marketing that focuses on getting found by customers. This sense is related to relationship marketing and Seth Godin's idea of permission marketing. David Meerman Scott recommends that marketers "earn their way in" (via publishing helpful information on a blog etc.) in contrast to outbound marketing where they used to have to "buy, beg, or bug their way in" (via paid advertisements, issuing press releases in the hope they get picked up by the trade press, or paying commissioned sales people, respectively). Next best action marketing can also be applied.
Definition Of Outbound Marketing (wikipedia):
Traditional marketing (outbound marketing) is where companies focus on finding customers by advertising. This sense is related to intrusion marketing and Godin's term interruption marketing. Traditional marketing (outbound marketing) is where companies focus on finding customers by advertising. This sense is related to intrusion marketing and Godin's term interruption marketing.
Further descriptions and examples of both Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing:
Inbound Marketing Examples:
- Web pages: design and development of message by use of web pagesor web sites.
- Landing page: similar to above but with a more targeted message.
- Key phrase development: this is an important foundation for the above SEO process.
- SEO or search engine optimization: The process of making web pages more search friendly.
- Social media usage: delivery of marketing messages via Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, You Tube, Digg, Delicious, etc.
- Blog Posting: Uploading or posting of market related information.
- Link development: this is a very important process of attracting and securing inbound links from web pages, blogs, tweets & status updates of social media accounts of other individuals or business organizations.
- Internal lead generation: some form of internal systems (usually a lead generation or lead tracking software application) used to generate leads from existing web page traffic.
- Internal lead tracking: lead tracking software solution that allows for understanding all statistics produced from traffic conversion.
- Lead nurturing: the process of continued communication or nurturing of converted leads.
Outbound Marketing Examples:
- Direct mail
- Telemarketing
- Radios advertising
- TV advertising
- Print advertising
- Billboard advertising
Reasons that Inbound Marketing is now more effective than Outbound marketing:
- Higher ROI: In fact, search engine marketing is now the #1 return on investment when compared to all other marketing mediums.
- Inbound marketing is much more budget friendly: A small business is much more able to afford a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy.
- We have become more capable as consumers to "block" the outbound marketing message:
- Remote control
- Caller ID
- DVR
- satellite radio
The simple approach of providing relevant information as the individual or business is actively seeking, is becoming a more efficient, effective, budget friendly and most importantly, common sense method of delivering your messages.
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Thu, Mar 11, 2010
What's the first thing a company or business professional needs to understand when they begin or advance an inbound marketing plan?
My short and quick answer is this. They need to "get it", "understand it", "embrace it".
If you asked me to isolate one of the most significant challenges as an inbound marketing (Internet marketing) software & services provider, it has to be getting my clients (and prospects) to understand as many of the basic changes taking place in the world of marketing and message delivery. Then react and embrace those changes.
Even more significant is... If you asked me to isolate one of the most significant challenges for my business owner or business professional clients, it would be the same challenge.
The most useful way for me to explain this point for other (interested) inbound marketing professionals and all business that need to consider employment of these strategies is sharing this latest experience.
Client: The Corporate Sedan Service
Client Location: Philadelphia, PA
Client Background: Provides sedan and limousine services to major airports in the tri-state area.
Client Size: 29 corporate style sedans, 7 limousines, 5 shuttle vans, 2 mini-buses
Client History:Ground transportation service provider since 1996.
I (Virtual Support Systems) have been working with this client for a few years on a number of different projects. The relationship started like many as goals were established and the related work and performance was dictated in the form of instructions. Beginning an SEO project would be a good example. The client thought better search engine position would be beneficial to the marketing efforts of his business so the project was handed off to my company, we did the required work and reported the results to the client and everyone was happy.
Fast forward to current times and as most of us can see, the demands of today's business leaders are changing and they are required to "get more involved".
As part of a "new strategy" discussion with this client last year, I explained as clearly as possible that new times, demanded new strategies. I continued to explain that these new strategies would demand fundamental changes in thinking and some of the old ways of managing our marketing must change. I further explained that as Operations Officer of this company, he would need to take part and pay regular attention to some or all the following:
- Evaluating current content on the web site.
- Dictate specific modification needed to web site content.
- To help develop new, powerful and relevant content for web site.
- Establish profiles on Twitter, Linked In, Facebook, etc.
- Use Google Reader to subscribe to related industry information.
- Regularly read & stay current on industry content.
- Create & develop a blog.
- Utilize his new social media accounts to communicate to his customers.
- Learn traffic analysis skills.
- Brainstorm new offers & develop landing pages.
- Answer and coment on other industry blogs.
- Answer target market's questions on blogs & other social media.
- Teach company employees to contribute to blog and other content.
These and other changes are not easy for business owners who have been employing traditional marketing strategies for many years. Thats what makes this challenge so real and so critical.
In this case, almost to my amazement, the client started to relax, absorb and understand the new power he himself has over the future success of his business in this fast changing climate. Keep in mind that the ground transportation business is old school, blue collar and probably not first on my list to embrace change. To illustrate and drive home this point, do a quick search of regional or local limousine web sites and you will quickly see they are dangerously behind. It's not difficult to see that a web site has had no real attention for 5 years or more.
Conclusion: The better a business owner, professional or leader understands what changes are taking place, the better a client understand their new role, the better a company executive understand the specific methods they can accelerate their performance... the more loyal the client and the more successful the client will become. The first step is to teach the client to understand the real time condition of the web site.
To other Inbound Marketing Professionals: The better the communication and educational skills, more we can help our clients.
Thanks for reading!
Inbound Marketing & Blogging
How to Blog Effectively for Business (GF101)
Posted by Daniel Shlifer on Sat, Feb 27, 2010
The best search marketing must be complete search marketing.
To be clear, as a search marketing professional, my experience tells me that the more complete a search marketing strategy and plan is, the more effective it will be. Maybe that is nothing more than common sense to some but others don't seem to be clear about the various elements that are available when creating a comprehensive search marketing project.
Use the search marketing checklist below as a basic road map for your search marketing project. The more of these components you have included in your plan, the better. Remember though, don't just include them, pay them attention and develop them consistently.
Best Search Marketing Checklist:
- Compelling content: Make sure you offer the visitor what they were searching for in the first place. This helps your efforts from both the visitor and the search engine's perspective.
- Blog: This is critical for developing your timely content, attracting links and increasing the total number of pages on your web site.
- # of Indexed Pages: Pay attention to the number of your web site's pages that are indexed by Google. The more, the better.
- Readability Level: Make sure your writing and the content is developed for your target market and not too difficult to understand or too elementary.
- Meta Tags: Make sure all the HTML tags on each of your web pages have been optimized for the relevant keywords or keyphrases. These include title tags, description tags, header tags, image tags and keyword tags at a minimum.
- Domain name renewal term: Make sure your domain name is renewed for more than 2 years into the future. The search engine see this as a component of stability.
- Domain name redirect: Make sure you have a permanent redirect for the http://domainname.com portion of your sita as search engine may see this and the www.domainname.com as two separate web sites.
- Inbound links: The more links from other web site's that point to your web site the better. One way links are your goal as reciprocal links don't carry weight anymore. You also want links from related web site's with good traffic.
- Directory listings: Secure as many free and certain paid directory listings as you can. Ex. Yahoo Directory
- Linked In account: Especially if your products or services are business to business related, this is a good social media web site to connect and promote.
- Twitter account
- Facebook or Facebook Fan Page
- Utilize del.ico.us bookmarketing
- RSS feed: Make sure you make it easy for others to receive your developing content
- Landing pages: Be sure to have your web site configured to provide targeted information to targeted markets and keywords.
- Conversion forms: Make sure you have conversion forms in place to convert traffic to leads.
- Lead generation software
- Lead tracking software
- Lead nurturing software
- Comprehensive search marketing software: Manage all of these and other elements of your search marketing plan with a complete software application.
These elements have much more detail than what I have listed in this best search marketing checklist. My recommendation is to use the advice of a search marketing professional coupled with search marketing software. There are other components of a comprehensive search marketing strategy but this best search marketing checklist is a great place to start the analysis of your project.