December 16th, 2007
By: Shama Hyder
You and your firm do a great job for your current clients, and your offline marketing techniques have been delivering decent results. So, why do you need to invest in online marketing? Why care where you rank in the search engines?
The same reason you care about anything else…because your prospects and clients care.
According to research done by WebVisible and Nielson, 74% of the 2000 respondents they polled said they used search engines to find information on local businesses.
Where do you fall in the search engines? What keywords do your prospects use to find your services? And how many of those prospects are you losing to competitors because they rank higher than you on the search engines?
The best part about search engines is that they level the playing field. Smaller firms can compete with bigger firms-without paying more. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is also a lot more cost effective and efficient in the long run compared to advertising.
Bottom Line: What’s stopping you from leveraging the internet to market your business and your services?
Posted in Internet Marketing, Marketing Tools for Your Service Business, Marketing Your Business | 1 Comment »
December 3rd, 2007
- SE- Search Engine. For example, Google is an SE.
- SEM- Search Engine Marketing. A group of sales and marketing strategies used to increase website visibility online. Usually includes SEO and PPC.
- SEO- Search Engine Optimization. Changing a website’s html code to increase its ranking on search engines.
- PPC- Pay Per Click. Online advertising model where you pay for each click your website receives. Google’s PPC service is known as AdWords.
- SEP- Search Engine Promotion. Another word for SEO.
- Spider- An automated robot which crawls the web using links on web pages.
- Spoof- Trying to fool or mislead a search engine. (Usually backfires and can get your website blacklisted).
- Landing Page- The homepage of your website. This is where a visitor first lands.
- SERP- Search Engine Results Page. If you search for a particular keyword and your website comes up 5th on the list, then your website is number 7 in the SERPs.
- Conversion- A successful action by the visitor. This can vary from getting a visitor to buy your product to signing up for your newsletter. This is usually expressed in terms of a ratio. For example, you get a 100 visitors per day, and 10 of them end up purchasing your product. This would be a 10% conversion rate.
Posted in Internet Marketing, Marketing Tools for Your Service Business, Marketing Your Business, Social Media Marketing | 5 Comments »
October 24th, 2007
1) Use quotations. When looking for an explicit phrase, put it in quotations. Instead of typing small business marketing, try enclosing the phrase within double quotes.
Example- "Small Business Marketing"
2) Search a Specific Site: Want to search a particular site for a phrase but the site doesn’t have a built-in search box? You can use Google by simply typing in "site:somesite.com."
Example: "how to manage a business" site:www.AfterTheLaunch.com
3) Searching Specific Document Types: Looking for just images or power point presentations? Anytime you are searching for a specific document type, use "filetype:" to modify your search results.
Example: "small business marketing" filetype:ppt
4) Check Local Time- To check the local time of a city, simple type in time in x city
Example: Time in London
5) Search Patents- Have an idea for an invention but no clue if someone already had it first? Search Google Patents.
Posted in Internet Marketing, Managing Your Business, Web Entrepreneur Community | No Comments »
