Search Engine Marketing

As we continue to audit websites for our prospective and current clients, we have found five things a website needs to fix to be relevant in 2013 as mobile and search become more important.

1. Open site Architecture - We constantly are amazed when we look at a site and see that it cannot be accessed by search engines and people wonder why they don't rank in Google. Every site should be seamless to Google and set up to have good SEO on the backend with Page Titles, H1 Tags, URL structures and Alt Tags, so both Google and people on your site are able to find things easily.
2. Better Hosting - People tend to be penny wise and pound foolish when it comes to hosting. Too often, we see sites hosted on GoDaddys out of Arizona when there actual business is located in New Jersey. Not only do they lose the local search potential, but they typically have slow sites. Slow sites cause people to give up on the site and abandon what they were doing, which may be buying something. Getting a faster server can lead to a fast website with better conversion pages, more sharing, more links, happy users and a higher search ranking. This is money well spent. We absolutely love Linode for our own site and our clients. 
3. Social Media -  Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are three of the best referrers of website traffic on the Internet. They serve millions of people every day and give every organization big and small a chance to be part of that audience. Every business should be on Facebook and Twitter. Every business to consumer needs a Pinterest account and every business to business needs to use LinkedIn. Once each profile is set up, it's important to ensure they are updated daily with links back to the site. Too often we go onto someone's Facebook page and find no links back to the website.
4. Analytics - Google analytics is still one of the best resources people can use to measure their site's traffic and stats, but too often we see people focused on visits when they should be looking at bounce rate, time on site, site speed and funnel conversion to understand where their site can be improved. Further, people need to see what's working, are you getting sales from articles people are writing about you? or AdWords? or Social Media? Monitoring you analytics will tell you what's working and what's not..
5. Responsive Design - The age of the smartphone as arrived and with new form factors coming out like the iPad mini, it's important for sites to render effectively on mobile and tablet devices without causing additional overhead. 

Every site can benefit from the above items to stay ahead or overtake their competition. Now, making it happen sounds like a great New Year's resolution for 2013.

In a lot of ways when people hire us, it's a little bit like hiring a general contractor for building a house. We come in and have various people in our company that work with each client to help build out your digital presence rather than having a company either do it themselves or manage many vendors. Like a general contractor, it's our job to have that expertise on staff from designers to SEO to programmers, so you simply need to tell us what to build. Some companies do prefer the go it alone or multi vendor approach and we look at five reasons to hire a marketing company.

1. Experience, experience, experience - We know how to build up a digital presence post by post and keyword by keyword. This has come from years of experience doing this day in and day out, so rather than people reading "SEO for dummies", it's actually easier to just hire a digital company to help you get found on the Internet.
2. We are cheaper than an employee and way cheaper than employees - Our rates start at $2,000 a month. So if you can find a digital marketing expert for less than $24,00, please let us know so we can hire them! Seriously, it saves companies a lot of money to outsource their marketing to us.
3. Good Marketing is a mixture of art and science - There is no systematic, one-size fits all marketing solution for everyone. A reputable marketing business asks what you sell, and who you sell it to so they can create a custom marketing plan. Every client is different, and some tactics work well across clients, but not all. Having a well executed plan can create a lot of revenue.
4. I can't draw so I hired a designer  - Rather than having to go out and get a professional designer, we keep one on staff so they can do all design on everything from coupon and logo design to website design
5. It helps to have an outsider - Most people feel very passionate about their business. Having someone come in and give you some ideas about getting the word out that you may not have considered can be awfully valuable.

So to conclude, it's always a good idea to ensure you use outside companies to do things like accounting, marketing and website support so you can do what you do best, concentrate on making your business great.

One basic tenet of SEO it to try and understand how people search on Google and Bing so you can craft keyword strategies and titles based on those search patterns. The first thing to understand about how people search is that people search with intent. They are looking for something. The intent people search with can be categorized into the following:

1. Find
2. Learn
3. Solve
4. Buy

Each of these intents leads to different kinds of search categories. People will typically fall into the following kinds of searches:

1. Navigational Searches - They are looking for a specific website but they don't remember the exact URL. Google Instant is actually quite good at helping with this kind of search. The  intent of the user here is to find a particular website. For SEO purposes, this means that your brand name and website name should be easily indexed by Google so people can find you.
2. Informational Searches - This is Google's bread and butter. Stuff like What is the weather in Charlotte NC? Who won best actor in 1964? People will usually tend to form these searches in the form of a question and the goal is finding the information itself.
3. Commercial Investigation - People working at businesses will be given tasks by their supervisors. Things like, hey we need a website built or can you find a good landscaper in San Diego. These are the modern day equivalents of looking in the Yellow Pages. Rather than turning to the yellow pages, they turn to Google to find reputable businesses to contact. These may or may not lead to commerce or leads, but presents an opportunity for both, same as someone seeing your ad in the Yellow Pages.
4. Looking for a Purchase - People will search the Internet when they are ready to buy. This will typically spike around specific holidays as people look for very specific gifts for ideas for gifts. Things like best father's day gifts. Making sure your products are specific in terms of keywords can help land people on that page.

So as you start to come up with a keyword strategy, the first thing to figure out is you goals. Do you want people to buy or become a lead? The next step is to list your services or inventory and then start to research keywords around each service or product with the question of how are people going to find this?  Once you are able to understand the way people search, it becomes much easier to create keywords people will use in their searches.