Marketing on Internet Road 

Employing Internet Marketing strategies does not necessarily mean a new way of doing business. It is true that the internet and online marketing opened up a window for new and advance way of doing business, but it is also an online reflection of the way you do business offline.

Ask yourself the following question: “How do I get business today?” This answer should lead you in to the best main strategy you need to be using in your Internet Marketing portfolio.
If you are doing business by more than only one method, use more than one method online. Furthermore, extend your online marketing efforts to be using more than one main strategy. This way you can significantly increase your business while still being very efficient, be able to make constant changes and keep the costs low (surely when compared to your traditional marketing tactics).

Word of Mouth and/or Networking

With Word of Mouth the most important factor is referrals and positive reviews on your products and services. The best fit is with Social Media Marketing.
Depending on your exact type of business, choose your Social Networks: LinkedIn (mainly if you are in B2B), Twitter, Facebook and so on. Social Media is all about connections, referrals and experiences people on those networks experienced. This is literally the new way of Word of Mouth.
The complimentary Internet Marketing strategy to use is permission based Email Marketing: use your website and other online touch-points (like you page on Facebook) to encourage customers and prospects to subscribe to your mailing list. Then, send them timely newsletters to keep them engaged and further encourage them to forward your messages to others.

Cold Calling

If your business depends on Cold Calls or incoming phone calls, your strategies should combine Search Engine Marketing together with bought-list-based Email Marketing.
The Search Engine Marketing strategies of Search Engine Optimization and Pay-per-Click will ensure your phone is ringing. They are designed to get you found by your target market and potential customers exactly when they are looking for what you have to offer, where they are searching for it and in the way they are searching for it.
If you can purchase bought lists of your potential customers (watch out for legal aspects depending on your location and the vendor), this is a very close match to your cold calling tactics, only via the internet – much cheaper, more flexible and more effective.

Advertising

If you focusing offline on advertising, online you should put your focus on
-   SEO
-   PPC
-   Display advertising

As mentioned above, Search Engine Marketing tactics are the best ways in the online realm to reach your target audience. Done correctly, it should be much cheaper and much more effective than your offline advertising efforts. Consider allocating part of the traditional advertising budget to the online realm.
If your advertising budget is more substantial, explore the possibility of using Display Advertising: literally advertise your business (that is – your web pages) on websites that your potential customers visit. Display Advertising constantly improves and allows more capabilities of socio-demographic targeting to make your campaign more accurate and more successful.  

Face to Face

If your business depends on Face-to-Face meetings, make sure your “face” is visible online.
As this type of prospecting suggests you are in the B2B market, invest in your LinkedIn profile along with a professional profile on a Facebook page.
Furthermore, use YouTube to host videos on your business, your offerings and your sales representatives. Similarly, upload photos to Flickr and presentations to Slideshare.
Make sure to have a professional profile on each of those networks as this is one of the first things people will look at and will help them have a positive perception of your business.

The importance of Google Analytics to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) could never be underestimated. It’s not only one of the best ways to measure the results and the effect of the SEO strategy being implemented, it is an amazing tool for directing SEO efforts.

The main advantage of Google Analytics is that it shows data, hard facts, from your website. This is as accurate as data can be. It is even more accurate than ranking of your different web pages on Google, and this is why it should be analyzed at the beginning of any SEO implementation and throughout the project on timely intervals (usually months should be enough; otherwise – weeks).

The other good thing with Google Analytics is that in order to understand the basics there is no need for any expertise. Don’t get me wrong – Google Analytics certification is amazing and even critical for proper understanding of the online marketing realm. But for SEO purposes it is enough to look at some reports, understand what they tell you and act accordingly.

SEO-Related Data to Learn from Google Analytics

Some examples of what Analytics will tell you on your Search Engine Optimization:

• How many visitors are getting to the website?
• Which search engines your visitors are using to find your website?
• Which keywords are being used to land on your website? Which pages are your “Landing Pages” for the various keywords?
• Are most of your visitors finding your website by branded searches or non-branded ones (i.e.: searching for different versions of your name or for your products and services?)
• What is the Bounce Rate of the pages your visitors land on and why? Do they find the information there relevant to what they searched for or not?
• And more.

So don’t “fly blind”: instead of doing your SEO without learning anything on the results or knowing what’s working, what’s not working and what other opportunities are there on your main asset (i.e. – your website), dive in to your Google Analytics reports and spend some time understanding what it tells you on your SEO situation.  Your SEO results will show much improvement that way, granted.

Everyone knows that SEO is important. The main question being asked constantly is how much and what does it mean to have your website’s page on a certain ranking on Google search results page.

A new research from Citika analyzed the value of the different rankings on Google.

The main insights from the research were:

• Being on position 1 on Google is priceless. This position worth twice the traffic coming from being on position 2 (!)
• As we all know, the biggest difference is from page 2 to page 1: Moving from position number 11 (top of page 2) to number 10 (bottom of page 1) means a growth of 143% in traffic. Although some traffic is coming from page 2 positions, it cannot be compared with being on page 1.
• Positions 1 to 4 on Google drives 70% of traffic to websites.
• The number 1 position brought almost 35% of all traffic. This was almost as much as what positions 2 to 5 together drove. This was also more than the traffic positions 5 to 20 drove together .

The research and its findings shows that anyone should invest in Search Engine Optimization and make sure the web pages he/she owns get to the top position of Google search results pages for multiple keywords.

Google are rolling out new set of Adwords reports on Google Analytics. Still carries the indication of “Beta” but it seems it was worth waiting.

For Adwords advertisers, this seems to make the difference in analysis. A lot of data we were struggling to find on Adwords reporting center should now be available where it belongs – on Google Analytics.

Running an Adwords campaign is not only on reading the CTR of a keyword or an ad. In order to improve those conversions of ours we need to dive deep and understand what were the next steps of the campaign *on our website*. According to the announcement of Google, this is exactly the intention with the new reports.

So, if you have connected your Analytics and Adwords account correctly, signing in to your Analytics account will show you the new AdWords section, under the “Traffic Source” menu.

A click on the link will open the sub-menu with 7 reports, some of them as they appear on the previous Adwords reports and some new ones.

The real beauty – and this is new in Analytics – is in the Overview report: the guys from Google took a real effort to speak in a very simple language and to put links to very (and again – very) interesting reports by placing questions that any advertiser should ask him.
I will aim to put much more details on the various reports and options in future posts, but one that I couldn’t hold myself back from is the Search Queries report (“what do users search for to access my site?”). This highly useful report is now made available on Analytics and shows you a step further from only the keywords that drove traffic: the actual search queries used by the visitors that triggered the keywords you are using that brought traffic to your website. All of this, along with visits data such as bounce rate, time on site, goal conversions and more. Talking about valuable insightful data!

There is no doubt this is a great enhancement to the usage of Google Analytics on a holistic approach of a website owner and surely for Adwords advertisers. Enjoy!

Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts are tightly related to the keywords you are trying to target. The rule is always “one keyword (or keyphrase) – one page”. As such, it is obvious that the use of this major keyword you are optimizing the page for will be used on the page.

Note that the factors that impact SEO can be roughly divided into On-Page and Off-Page factors. When focusing on the on-page ones, we keep on repeating the phrase “Content is KING”. This means that there is simply no SEO without proper and relevant content, no matter what your optimization efforts are. Only then the rest of the factors come.

Once good, relevant (to the main keyword being targeted) and persuasive content is written, start working your keyword optimization into the page.

Here are the places you want to work out your keywords on the page:

• Page URL – Simply put, use the keyword in the name of the page (www.example.com/keywords.html). This will help not only your SEO efforts, but also traffic and potentially conversion since it will appear in bold on the Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and will get more clicks from those that were searching for the keyword.

• Page Title Tag – Maybe the most important place to put your keyword. This is considered by some SEO practitioners as a science on its own. Whatever you do, remember that the keyword is more important that your name. so use the keyword in the title with a sentence that makes sense.

• Meta Description Tag – The one place that won’t be seen to the end user, so becoming less and less important for SEO. Still, has some SEO value and similar to the title tag, will be presented to the visitor on the SERP.

• Page headers – Make sure your page as a header marked with <H1> tag. This header needs to support your title and present again your keyword. Just the same, break the page to section with sub-headers (<H2> tags).

• Page body text – You will hear different numbers on how many times your keyword should appear on the page. We found that 1.5%-2% (twice per every 100 words) is safe and good. Place your keyword on the text.

• Images – Depending on the industry, you may find that a lot of people find your page via searching for images. Regardless, it is yet another place to optimize, so the keyword is relevant here as well. Use the keyword in the image name, in the Alt tag and if possible in the text near the image (or even a caption if you place one below or above the image).

• Links Anchor Text – This one is different. You want to have links coming to the page from other pages (and other website), carrying text with the keyword you are optimizing the page for. This in a way tells the search engine that the destination page of the link is all about the text in the anchor text which is exactly what you want. Start with the correct internal links (internal site navigation) and place the correct keyword the page is optimized for in the anchor text of the link that points to this page.

You can probably notice that the keywords meta tags is not mentioned anywhere in the list. There is no mistake: all search engines announced they stopped analyzing the keywords in this meta tag, so it is simply pointless. Make sure to put your keywords properly on the page, where it does matter and you will improve your SEO results.

Last comment about secondary keywords: there is always a set of secondary keywords that are related to the primary one you are trying to target. Search engines expect to find those secondary ones in the text, otherwise the context is wrong and you might have a page risking keyword stuffing which will result in the opposite effect you are trying to reach…