Posts Tagged ‘sem’

Keeping up with local SEM changes

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

local sem success

Has local SEM or search engine marketing got you confused lately? Things are certainly not the same as they were 2 or 3 years ago? The local search marketing game is changing folks and technology can be blamed on that. Chances are in the next three years it will change even more so don’t get too mad. Just hop on the horse and try to hold on.

Let’s take a look at how the local SEM game has changed over the years:

Local SEM Change#1 – Blogs

Blogs have been around for a number of years but I still see many website owners trying to market themselves locally that still do not understand the concept of a blog. A blog is nothing more than a journal entry of your choice that adds a whole new page to your website. You can structure that post as you wish and with a little savviness that blog post can rank for a variety of search terms in the industry.

Local SEM Change#2 – Social Media

Now wasn’t this a wrench in the gears for some? Who would have thought that communicating on a local level with your audience in front of your computer would make things so difficult for some businesses. It’s still cheaper than a newspaper ad but when you have been doing print advertising for a better part of your life it is tough to walk away from it for some. Can’t teach an old dog new tricks right?

search engine marketing companies

Local SEM Change#3 – Check In Technology

Hold onto your hat folks because this one might make your head spin. You walk into a Starbucks and you click a button to tell everyone you have checked in and now you have a mayor badge? What badge? To make things even worse for some businesses Facebook has stepped into to join the fun with the location check in technology which is going to downright give some business owners a head ache.

Don’t be scared but rather embrace the new changes and find a way to get involved with the new technologies related to your local SEM campaign. Waiting and hoping things will change is never going to happen. If you need help you can give me a buzz, I’ll be happy to evaluate your local SEM needs.

Targeting your niche in internet marketing

Saturday, March 19th, 2011

Target your niche in local SEO.

A basic but oft overlooked practice is that if you are doing any sort of online marketing, you want to target your niche audience. A niche audience is a group of potential customers that are most likely to use the products or services that you are marketing.

One common mistake that marketers on and offline make is that they market to the masses and never actually target the people who are going to be interested in your products or services. What this equals is countless time and money being wasted marketing to people who are not going to have any interest in what is being offered.

In short, targeted marketing and niche marketing are very similar. As mentioned, targeted marketing goes after a certain demographic of people, while niche marketing goes after the demographic of people who are going to be the most likely to use products or services that are being advertised. Finding good key phrases and keywords to use in pay per click advertisements is not always an easy task to accomplish though.

If a person is marketing a certain niche, how does he or she know if anyone is searching for it? Using Google trends is one way to start researching a key phrase or key term, but a lot of times, there is not enough data to provide online marketers with information if the niche that they are marketing in is small.

This is where internet marketing software comes into play and can be very useful. Using marketing software that can find the latest trends and mentions on the Internet gives marketers an advantage over those who do not have this information.

Once a marketer or advertiser finds out if there is enough of a demand for the niche that he or she is marketing in, they can easily use Google to find out what the competition is. If there isn’t a lot of pay per click ads showing up for the keywords that are entered or the websites that rank first organically are not very relevant to the keywords, then this gives the marketer a good impression that the niche is not overly saturated and competition is low.

Google Previews tweaks search engine marketing again

Saturday, November 13th, 2010

Last week Google launched its newest innovation on their search engine page: Instant Previews. The idea of a search engine website preview has been around for a while and with this launch, all Google Instant users will be able to view previews of search results pages without a plugin. This gives search engine marketing strategists call to look at their clients’ webpages and check for optimization, especially for companies using Flash websites

Google Instant Previews allows users to see Google’s cached version of a website without leaving the search results page. The look and feel of a webpage is more important than ever at enticing users to click. When a user clicks on the magnifying glass icon  next to a search result, an overlay will appear with preview of the page.  Once the magnifying glass is clicked, the user can hover over the other search results to scroll between previews.

So how will Instant Previews impact businesses?

Instant Previews will increase the importance of web design and usability and should decrease the number of clicks going to lower quality sites, doorway pages and sites praying on misspellings. As a company that optimizes both HTML and Flash websites, we believe Instant Previews has raised the importance of optimizing Flash websites yet again. Here is an example of Google Instant Preview:

I continue to stress to my clients in interactive marketing the importance of focusing on SEO in combination with page design and usability in order to create clean, useful and appealing sites that rank high in search engines and entice users to click. According to Google, people using Instant Previews are 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results on which they clicked.

The concept of previewing websites is far from new, but when the world’s largest search engine decides to add a visual representation of a page to the search results page, businesses must stay ahead of the curve. Google continues to lead the way in search engine innovation. From the June Caffeine update to the introduction of Google Instant in September to last weeks’ newest addition of Instant Previews, Google has made 2010 a remarkable year in search engine marketing.