Almost everyone in your organization has something valuable to add to this discussion. Why not ask them which keyword they think customers are searching for?

For example, start with your office manager, or whoever answers the phones for your company. That person is usually your first point of contact for potential customers who have questions. And those questions are like gold to you. Determine what people are asking when they call you for the first time (or if you get a lot of walk-in customers, consider what they’re asking for at the front counter). Chances are, your receptionist could rattle off 15 commonly asked questions along with a slew of “keywords” most people are using when they contact your organization.
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Summer’s Here! Are you targeting seasonal keywords for a solid PPC campaign?

When taking advantage of search engine optimization and Pay Per Click (PPC) to increase your traffic and profits, the use of well-researched keywords is crucial. If you have an e-commerce site, for example, your relevant and targeted keywords are key to cultivating return customers. (more…)

Want to have a contest? Let’s see who can create the most social media profiles by the end of the week. Sure, you’ve got your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts up and running already, but I’m talking about all the others out there. There are hundreds of them; social networking sites as far as the eye can see, each with a name more whimsical than the next.
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Why pay for traffic in search engines’ paid listings, if you can achieve high organic rank – the gift that keeps on giving with traffic, leads, and sales?

First, to digress a bit and to speak to an area near and dear to our hearts, high organic rank isn’t really free anymore.

With more and more business turning to online marketing, and in large part to search engine marketing, the competition for the first few listings of the search engine results is only growing. The sites ranking at the top of the results for competitive terms are paying in some way – either directly paying a search engine optimization/marketing company or paying with their own time and resources.
See our blog post “Search Engine Optimization: Not As Exciting As Magic” for much more on this topic.

But, now on to our main point:
Why would you need paid search advertising once you’ve achieved high organic search engine rank?
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There’s a 100 percent chance you’ve read at least one blog in your life. (It’s what you’re doing right now.) Easier, faster, and cheaper than building a full website, a blog is a convenient way for individuals to establish their own online presence.

But it’s not just a fun way for self-appointed authors to recap the last American Idol over their lunch break. Blogging has opened the door for businesses and organizations to disseminate useful, relevant information to their customers (existing and prospective) in ways that no other media traditionally offered. (more…)

Broadcasters, entertainers, marketing geniuses, and savvy professionals in just about every industry have remained loyal to a particular maxim since time immemorial:
Know thy audience.

Whether giving a speech, writing an article, or even picking up the phone, the value of knowing who you’re addressing can never be overstated.

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As Internet marketers and web developers, we’re partial to interactive marketing as a successful and innovative medium.

But recent news proves we’re not alone in our bias.

A May 2009 article from BizReport.com notes:

“Within the next year,  interactive marketing efforts will increase by 11%, to reach $25.6 billion. The report, from Forrester Research, predicts that by 2014 the interactive spend will top $50 billion.”

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Our last blog post weighed the new features some search engines are offering against the trusted results users receive from others – namely, Google. New data may answer the question posed as to how long it will take – if any length of time is long enough – for new features from other search engines to draw loyal searchers away from Google. But from a perspective of searcher loyalty, is Google really the clear winner?

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We’ve already told you all the great things you can find out about your marketing results with internet marketing and website tracking, but internet marketing gives you control even before you decide exactly what message you’re going to market.

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Internet marketing is often a mysterious topic that business owners face with skepticism. You know how a print ad works: You give a publication your creative, and you know you’ll be able to see it on a certain page of that publication. With the internet, you know you want more visitors to your website and you know what words you’d like them to find you for in the search engines, but how do you get from these ideas to results? How do you know it’s going to work when no one has a guarantee with Google? While internet marketing is certainly a less familiar form of marketing than print or television advertising, there’s much more certainty and far fewer guesses with this type of marketing than with traditional marketing.

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