Although we at Impact Media offer SEO services here in the UK, we recognise that some webmasters just love doing search engine optimisation themselves and, for that reason, we make a lot of SEO information freely available in our blog.
However, if you’re looking for free SEO tips on a regular basis, i.e. daily, then I recommend you take a look at the Daily SEO Tip blog.
This blog is dedicated to giving free SEO tips and was founded by SEO specialists, Loren Baker and Ann Smarty.
During a recession, everyone has two objectives: save money and make more. Internet marketing is an effective way to achieve both objectives and here are 5 top tips for marketing during the recession:
1. Smart Spending
Experts at Harvard Business School conclude that spending on marketing and advertising is one of the best ways to beat the recession. But you must get the most for your money. Internet marketing has many advantages over traditional marketing, but the most obvious is the low pricing structures. Internet advertising and marketing are a fraction of the phenomenal sums charged by traditional marketing and advertising agencies.
2: Precision Targeting
Internet marketing helps you connect directly with your potential customers. This is a significant advantage during a recession. Instead of widespread blanket marketing (the expensive kind), you can target your market by the area they are in and precisely how they are choosing to word their searches for your products or services.
To ensure a smart spend, you can target your marketing to a geographic area and set a budget that you can afford. Once you’ve had time to analyse the results, you can make smarter spending decisions.
3. Measure It
To ensure the cost effectiveness, you must be able to measure the success of your marketing. This has traditionally been very difficult to gauge from a television advert or billboard. But online marketing is fully measurable. This means you can analyse how effective your various campaigns are and drop the ones costing you money but not delivering desired outcomes.
Google AdWords is one of the most effective marketing/advertising weapons in your contemporary marketing arsenal. It allows smart spending, precision targeting and measurable results.
4. Give It Away
You may have less money, but you still have another valuable resource, time. Marketing effectively during a recession means building credibility. This involves giving away your expertise for free.
If you sell “Red Widgets” and every time I’ve got a question about my current Red Widget, I find the solution on your website, then I’m much more likely to buy my next Red Widget from you when the time comes. Blogging and article writing are marketing activities that cost only time and build credibility, loyalty and a relationship with your potential clients that begins long before they make the decision to buy from you and continues long after they’ve given you their money.
5. Change Your Story
Your customer tells themselves a story when they consider buying your product. They imagine themselves using, and they tell themselves a story about the benefits that it will bring. Whether it’s new office equipment, a motorbike lift or a piece of software, they tell themselves stories.
But during a recession, the customer’s behaviour changes, the story changes and focuses on security and stability, but also a tiny sliver of hope that they can return to spending freely. When your customer’s story changes you must respond by changing the elements of your business that your customer uses to construct their story.
Even during these recessionary times, Impact Media’s search engine marketing services still offer a cost effective to promote your business online. Find out more and if you’d like a no-obligation proposal as to how we could help, contact us to get full details and a risk-free SEO analysis of your site.
1: Use a Good SEO Agency
If you’re not an SEO expert, you’ll need to hire a top SEO agency, to deliver results and avoid the many costly mistakes that amateur SEO tinkering causes. A good SEO agency will have a proven track record and not be bashful about their successes. A great agency understands how to segue SEO into your present marketing plans and develop your online marketing in tandem with your current strategy.
It’s vital that your website includes optimised content and copy, but an excellent SEO agency will know how to select and place your target keywords throughout the site copy without killing the readability of the site or the experience of the visitor.
Great agencies know that the long way round is the shortest way home. They avoid short-cuts, automated submission and quick fix solutions.
2: There are no Guarantees
It’s vital that you understand in the world of SEO, there are few absolute guarantees. People that offer them are looking to earn quick money. A good, solid, blended approach to online marketing with SEO is the only way to deliver results, but the delivery of exact results such as the Number 1 position on Google is not something that can be guaranteed. Positions can be improved, traffic can be increased, but don’t listen to false guarantees.
3: Blend SEO into your PR Strategy
Slowly but surely SEO and PR strategies are merging. It’s no longer possible for you to plan a future PR strategy without considering SEO. The success of the Internet to reach the widest public audience means all of your online PR material can be optimised for Search Engines. Anything that’s published on the web becomes a way to interest customers. To survive in an increasingly competitive market, marketing managers will also need to begin using SEO with Social Media tools such as blogging, Squidoo, Twitter and Facebook to keep up with the competition.
4: Content is King
Relevant, fresh and original content is king. By keeping your website up to date, by publishing helpful articles and a daily blog, you not only attract frequent recurrent visitors, but also help increase your flow of visitors. Encourage your visitors to comment, debate and discuss your product/service with you and others and you’ll develop a community around your brand. This community can be instantly accessed to test new ideas and receive immediate feedback from.
5: Avoid the IT Crowd
IT specialists may be able to design and build your website, they may even be able to cobble together a bit of optimisation, but SEO is one of the core marketing activities that you should be undertaking. If you don’t have the expertise, then passing it off to your IT people is like passing off some of your most important offline marketing to your accountant. Poor SEO choices can have a dire effect on your online success.
Effective SEO for Marketing involves tracking leads, analytics, conversions and sales and adjusting your online marketing accordingly. Your team needs to make all of the SEO decisions, particularly content and copy generation and how to factor SEO into your overall public relations strategy. That’s why expert knowledge or advice on SEO is essential for all marketing managers.
When you’re writing copy for your website, you need to ensure that it’s SEO or Search Engine Optimisation friendly. Here are ten things to remember:
1. Write for your Reader
One of biggest mistakes people make with SEO Friendly Web Copy is trying to please the Search Engines at the cost of alienating the human visitors to their website. So your web copy should be written specifically to target your intended reader. This means imagining the site from the perspective of someone coming to it for the first time.
2. Clean Code
In order to get the most SEO value out of your website, your code needs to be crisp and clean. That means writing code that is well organised, well structured and correctly formatted. This will help your website’s relationship with the Search Engines stay friendly.
3. Use Images to Support the Main Message
A picture is worth a thousand words they say. But that doesn’t mean you should clutter your pages with unnecessary pictures. Find just the right images to support the main message of your website and each of its pages. Remember, Search Engines cannot read pictures, but your human visitors can really be persuaded by good quality, professional looking images.
4. Externalise Scripts
When using complex scripts such as Java, you can make your pages easier to read by placing the JavaScript into External Files. This will make them easier to read by Search Engines. If you must use JavaScript on your pages, consider placing it at the bottom of the page so that the Search Engines read your content first.
5. Keywords
Research your Keywords carefully, choose 2 or 3 priority Keywords and work them naturally into your web copy. There’s no point stuffing the pages with Keywords, as both the Search Engines and human visitors will find your pages of little value. Your copy needs to naturally feature your Keyword selections at the right density without losing its flow.
6. Use Headers
Your headers need to feature your keywords and your brand/company name. Search Engines often crawl this information first, so important decisions as to the relevance of your site are made at this point. Spend considerable time choosing the right copy for these Headers.
7. Copy Length
Keep your copy above 250 words if you wish to ensure that there’s enough space to get your message across without making the Keywords jar. Don’t waffle on to thousands of words; just keep your copy informative but to the point. People don’t read drivel and they won’t engage with reams and reams of text.
8. Benefits not Features
Describe the benefits that your product, service or company have to your potential customer or client. People don’t buy features, they want to know ‘What’s in it for me? When a prospective buyer reaches the point where they feel that your product or service would really benefit them, they will then consider buying.
9. Paragraphs
Keep your web copy to small bite sized paragraphs. Don’t give the reader too much work to do, web readers are lazier by nature and like to skip through to the important parts.
10. Proof Reading
Many people are so happy to have filled up their website with great copy that they forget to go back and proof read it. Silly mistakes make you and your comGpany seem thoughtless and unprofessional!
We hope this helps but if you’d rather spend your time managing your business, please review our search engine optimisation services page to see if we can be of assistance.
On the 11th Day of Christmas, we bring you 11 AdWords Tips:
1. Invest time in researching keywords
2. Set-up conversion tracking from the outset
3. Move to a standard campaign from starter as soon as possible
4. Create separate campaigns if advertising on the Content Network
5. Ensure you understand the difference in the match types and use as appropriate
6. Use negative keywords
7. Test ad copy to see which is most effective
8. Ensure your landing pages are optimised for your keywords and ad copy
9. Improve your quality score by having a fast and reliable web host
10. Use the search query report regularly and often, particularly if using broad match
11. Use AdWords Editor to make life easier!
On the 3rd Day of Christmas, Impact Media share 3 essential landing page tips:
As it’s the season of good will, we thought we would spread some Christmas cheer by offering you our very own Search Engine Marketing 12 Days Of Christmas.
We won’t be singing but we will be posting 12 Days worth of SEO and PPC tips, tricks, advise and expertise.
From link building tips, free online tools, analytics advice to SEO do’s and don’t, our Christmas gifts will be more welcome than the inevitability unwanted gift from Gran this year.
Our 12 days starts tomorrow so be sure to come by and pick up your first gift. Better still, subscribe using RSS to make sure you don’t miss out.
If you’ve been trying to get your web pages ranked in the top of the search engines by yourself but are struggling, you may just decide to use the services of a professional search engine optimisation (SEO) company.
The big question is how do you go about picking a company to become your search marketing partner? How do you find a good SEO company that can do this effectively?
Here’s our top tips to choosing a good SEO company:
At Impact Media, we’re proud of the results we’ve achieved for our clients and would encourage you to review our search engine optimisation case studies.
You’ve finally taken the plunge to improve your online marketing efforts and set-up your very first Pay per Click campaign with Google AdWords.
You marvel at how easy it was to create your first Ad Group and appreciated the way Google suggested some keywords you might like to add. You worked through your reservations over some of the keywords as you figured that those clever people at Google knew far more about your business than you. Finally, you couldn’t quite believe how easy Google made it to add your credit card details…
Roll forward two months and whilst you appreciate that the level of web site enquiries have improved, you just wish that some of them were connected to your business! You start to question your own ability to sell online and figure that Pay per Click is just too complicated and best left to others. It doesn’t have to be that way. Google AdWords can work for you.
If you use Google’s Pay per Click service, it can seem at first that you’re on your own when it comes to getting help with managing your AdWords campaign.
Google make it really easy to set-up your account and, although they provide a comprehensive AdWords help section, it can sometimes seem quite daunting when you first get started with this form of online marketing.
So, what else should you do? Well, if you plan on using Pay per Click (PPC) consistently, you should invest in at least one good book. Just do a search of Amazon and check out the reviews. Perry Marshall and Andrew Goodman are two well respected authors on the topic.
We’ve published a handy checklist of Google AdWords Tips that you should find useful.
Finally, you may decide that you want to spend your time managing your business rather than becoming an AdWords expert. If that’s the case and you plan on investing significantly in PPC then the answer may be to out-source your AdWords management to a qualified specialist. Clearly this will carry a cost but if you pick the right service provider, they should add significantly more value to your bottom line.
The main thing though if you plan on diverting some of your marketing budget online is to seek out appropriate help and not assume that just handing your credit card details to Google is all it takes to make a successful campaign!
Google are well known for their technical innovations and when it comes to pay per click (PPC), their AdWords advertising system is the clear market leader.
However, they’re not perfect and recently seemed to have dropped the ball when it comes to using Broad Match. This is the most common type of matching used when you create an AdWords campaign with the others being Phrase Match and Exact Match.
In very simple terms, Broad Match previously meant that if you entered a keyphrase, e.g. England Football Team, those three words could appear in any order and still display your advert. For example, someone entering the search term, “What is the best football team in England?” could have displayed your ad.
In short, Broad Match has always given most exposures but not always relevant. To combat this, we add a large dose of Negative Keywords.
Now though, Google are developing their algorithms to enable synonym replacement on words. Carrying this example on, it may be that the system thinks ‘English‘ is a good swap for ‘England‘ and ‘teams‘ for ‘team‘ so someone searching for “English football teams” could display your ad. Not too bad? What about “England Rugby Team“?
Although this is a very frivolous example, last week we saw in our own campaign that we had paid for the click “John Lewis Website“. This had come from the broad term Website Marketing Company. Go figure!
The point here is that we’re seeing a lot of totally unrelated searches coming through and if you’re running your own AdWords campaign and have it full of broad terms, you may want to start running regular Search Query reports and scanning a critical eye over the search queries column. Go on, run one today… you may be in for a bit of a surprise!
More AdWords Tips…
