People are searching online all the time. Here’s how to be what they find.
Why be a needle when you can be a haystack?
If you’re anywhere near a haystack, you can’t miss it. It just sits there saying, “Deal with me.” Your site should have a similar presence, except on the internet, not in a field. As long as hordes of people are buzzing around the internet every day, looking for products and information, it only makes sense to place your company in their path. The art and science of being unmissable on the web is what search marketing is all about. Broadly speaking, the discipline can be broken down into complementary pursuits of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Our search team—(yes we have a search team, and they’re great, but they don’t rappel out of helicopters)—can use SEO and SEM to help your company show up wherever your customers happen to be looking.
Keywords, schmeywords.
Oh, don’t get us wrong. Keywords are important. But they’re also really easy—so easy we could tell you most of what you need to know over coffee. (By the way, we have coffee at our office, so drop by any time.) But you need to do more to get your site near the top of organic search results than just sprinkling a few obvious words in the copy.
Those knuckleheads at Google keep things interesting.
They’re always changing the way Google works. And here’s what makes it especially gripping: they don’t tell us much about what they’re up to. This behavior is not Google just being a bunch of mischief-loving scamps. By keeping a shroud over how The All-Knowing Algorithm works—and by regularly tweaking said Algorithm—Google prevents internet scoundrels from rigging search results. This means that companies like yours (and ours) must actually pony up good content—and organize it well—in order to be blessed with Google’s favor. Not to worry. We can help you with that.
If you like traffic, you’ll love conversions.
A conversion occurs when a visitor to your site does what you want them to do. This might be an e-commerce purchase, but it could be any number of other things. Maybe you want them to sign up for your newsletter. Maybe you want your company to be put on a short list for call-backs. Whatever your definition of conversion is, you’ll be delighted to hear that a really solid SEO strategy not only drives traffic to your site but it should also increase conversions. If you ask our SEO and SEM team to increase conversions, they’ll roll up their sleeves and get to it.
SEM is trackable and trainable. And you only pay when it works.
Have you ever been idly considering a new couch and then you notice banner ads for couches popping up all over the internet? Clever, no? Yes! Even folks who are slightly mystified at how this happens are impressed. And some of them do buy couches. (By the way this effect applies not just to couches but also kimonos, cat toys, and every other thing in the universe that you can buy.) Another marvelous method is the pay-per-click ad. These small ads can generate mind-boggling ROI, when done right. Doing them right includes such best practices as creating dedicated landing pages to welcome those who click through. SEM techniques are gloriously trackable—and also trainable, by which we mean the following. A good SEM program is continually monitoring effectiveness and generating suggestions for revisions to enhance performance.
We call it “local optimization,” but only because we’re nerds.
It’s what most people call word of mouth, except this is the internet version. For businesses that provide service within a certain geographic area, local optimization is crucial. Your business must make itself known in a consistent way across all local directories. (Yes we can help with that.)
Once your company is not just on the map, but all maps, it will rank higher in search results and be easier to find using a mobile device (for example, by enabling “click to call” directly from search results).
If you don’t have something nice to say about a bad reviewer, say something nice anyway.
Reputation management is becoming increasingly important as more and more people get used to looking for reviews online. No matter how good your product or service is, it is extremely likely that somebody is going to submit a mean-spirited review of it. First, take a deep breath. Then, remember that you have an active reputation management program that will do what it can to soothe the angered customer, and impress other internet surfers with your generosity. With all of us getting more and more accustomed to making purchase decisions with the help of reviews, this aspect of marketing is becoming incredibly influential.
