Here is a new video I just completed introducing Real Web Marketing Inc.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
The Local Business on the Internet
by John Eberhard
The marketing of a local business, one that just sells products or services within a limited geographical area, such as a restaurant, a health care practice, or a home improvement company, is a special issue and has to be treated differently from a business that can sell its products or services nationally or internationally.
What’s More Important for a Local Business
Google Maps: Google has completely changed the search landscape with the introduction of Google Maps. When someone enters a search that Google determines is local in nature, they put up a map in the right hand column showing businesses near you. And then you will see listings in the left hand column related to the red dots on that map. Google keeps changing the way the listings are displayed. Right now there is a special section in the left hand column with all the Google Maps listings. See below for a screen shot of a search for pizza.
When I first started doing work on Google Maps I thought you could just throw up a listing on Google Maps and you were done. But I soon found out that with some particularly competitive industries, such as dentists for instance, that you had to continue to work it month to month by adding more and more listings on other sites (called “citations” in Google parlance, and Google sees these and it helps push your listing toward the top). Also it is important to work to get more reviews from customers.
But if you get onto the first page of Google results via Google Maps, you will see good traffic from that.
Google AdWords: Pay per click advertising through Google AdWords is very important for the local business, but only for relatively high ticket items, i.e. products or services that sell for say $200 or more. That is because of the large number of businesses that now advertise on Google AdWords, which pushes the bid prices up. So this works very well for say, a home improvement company that sells services starting at $5,000, but not so well for a company that sells something for $50.
But if it is appropriate for your type of business, pay per click is a great way to generate leads or sales, quickly, and on an ongoing basis. And you can select the exact geographical area where your ads will appear, so you don’t waste your money on people outside your service area.
Email Marketing: Marketing to people via email, specifically by creating a growing an “in-house” list of customers and prospects, is vital for the local business. I have observed that renting email lists, which was a huge deal back in the early 2000s, is now pretty much dead, because of the proliferation of spam. But if people are already aware of you, then email newsletters and other reminders about you and your services are vital today.
This means you have to have things on your web site for what we call “capturing identities.” This means to have a “contact us” form, but also to offer things that will appeal to your prospects and especially appeal to people who would be your prospect but are not ready to buy right now. So it is a good idea to offer an email newsletter, as well as free information products such as free reports on topics related to your business. Basically these are things to build up your email list.
Video: Having videos on YouTube and on various places on your site has become more important over the last few years. This is an excellent way to differentiate your company from the pack and show the public what you do. See my recent articles on video marketing (1, 2).
Blogging: Having a blog and posting regular articles to it is an excellent way to drive traffic to a web site, although you can’t be guaranteed that everyone will be a local area resident. The key with blogging is to post things regularly, and to send a notice called a “ping” to blog search engines each time (this is done automatically in Wordpress).
What’s Less Important
SEO for General Keywords: If you are a dentist in Glendale, it is not very important for you to try to rank for the keyword “dentist.” Remember you will be competing with every dentist in the entire world. Similarly if you have a pizza restaurant in Pasadena, you should not try to do actions to rank for “pizza.” You’ll be competing with thousands of other restaurants and with corporate company sites like Pizza Hut and Dominoes.
What IS important for a local business these days is getting your web site to rank for local oriented keywords, like “dentist Glendale” or “pizza Pasadena.”
But I will add a big caution on this. I’ve seen companies similar to mine going around selling local businesses on services to get them to rank for local keywords like this. And the thing is that it will do you NO good whatsoever unless those keywords have some decent traffic coming to them. In other words, you can rank #1 for a keyword, but if no one is searching for it, so what? I have seen cases where someone was sold a package to get them ranking for local keywords and most or all of them had no value. So you have to do some research and see what kind of traffic the keywords have first before embarking on something like that. It depends on what industry you’re in and what location you’re in.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Real Web Marketing Inc. Offers Live Action Video
Company Offers Shooting of Live Video, Editing, and Uploading to Video Sharing Sites
LOS ANGELES: Real Web Marketing Inc. (http://www.realwebmarketing.net), a web design and website marketing company based in Southern California, is now offering live action video shooting and editing services. The company recently completed its first live action video editing project for Aero & Marine Tax Professionals, a tax consulting company located in northern California that helps people avoid paying sales tax on the purchase of aircraft.
Real Web Marketing’s video project for Aero & Marine Tax Professionals involved flying to Medford, Oregon to videotape the company’s seminar presented to aircraft owners. The completed video can be seen here:
John Eberhard, President of Real Web Marketing Inc., stated, “A while back we started doing video production, but we were limited to simple Powerpoint style slide show videos. Now we have upgraded our systems and software and are offering live action video. A recent study by Doubleclick found that people are 4-7 times more likely to respond to dynamic audio visual content than static content. This fits with my experience over the last few years in managing pay per click advertising, where I have found that we always got higher response when we put audio clips or video on our landing pages. A Forester study found that email clickthrough rates were 2-3 times higher with video, i.e. when you link in the email to a video. Marketing Sherpa found that viewers spend 8 times more time on video (1.5 minutes) than on static emails (10 seconds). The obvious conclusion is that adding video to any type of online campaign is important today and will improve results. That’s why we wanted to get into this.”
John Eberhard has been involved in marketing for a wide variety of businesses for 22 years. RealWebMarketing.net was founded in 1999 in the Los Angeles area, and has clients all over the U.S, in a wide variety of fields such as health care, consulting, construction, home improvement, skin care, debt counseling, personnel recruitment, court reporting, drug rehabilitation, publishing, software, jewelry manufacturing and online sales, residential and commercial real estate, dance instruction, tax consulting, plumbing, pool remodeling, tree nurseries, landscaping and many others. The services offered by RealWebMarketing.net include website design, blog design, pay-per-click advertising campaign management, search engine optimization, link building, article syndication, optimized press releases, RSS feeds, and video production.
Real Web Marketing Inc. Launches New Site for Marketing for Health Care Practices
Site to Offer Affordable Marketing Programs Including Web Design, Pay Per Click, and Google Maps for Doctors
LOS ANGELES: Real Web Marketing Inc. (http://www.realwebmarketing.net), a web design and website marketing company based in Southern California, has just launched a new web site called HealthCareTraffic.com (http://www.healthcaretraffic.com) offering online marketing services specifically for health care practices.
The web site’s initial offering is specifically for dentists, and includes three different Dentist Traffic Programs, with different costs based on the amount of services offered. Each of the three programs includes a search engine optimized and conversion optimized web site and blog, set up on social media sites, pay per click advertising, email marketing, local marketing through Google Maps and other similar sites, call tracking and autoresponder marketing.
John Eberhard, President of Real Web Marketing Inc., stated, “The economy is making it harder for all health care practices to get new patients. The concept behind this web site and these new marketing programs for dentists is to create a really comprehensive marketing program but bring the costs down and make it affordable for practice owners. Within a few months we will start to release similar programs for other health care professionals.”
John Eberhard has been involved in marketing for a wide variety of businesses for 22 years. RealWebMarketing.net was founded in 1999 in the Los Angeles area, and has clients all over the U.S, in a wide variety of fields such as health care, consulting, construction, home improvement, skin care, debt counseling, personnel recruitment, court reporting, drug rehabilitation, publishing, software, jewelry manufacturing and online sales, residential and commercial real estate, dance instruction, tax consulting, plumbing, pool remodeling, tree nurseries, landscaping and many others. The services offered by RealWebMarketing.net include website design, blog design, pay-per-click advertising campaign management, search engine optimization, link building, article syndication, optimized press releases, RSS feeds, and video production.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Video Marketing 102
by John Eberhard
In my last article I talked about video marketing and various statistics that indicate that video marketing is an important tool in marketing your business online today. I also listed out 6 different types of videos that a business could create today to market itself.
Recently I found market share figures from AimClear showing that in Google search results, YouTube results were returned 84% of the time. Not surprising, since Google owns YouTube. Dailymotion.com results were returned 3% of the time and Metacafe.com results were returned 2% of the time. So YouTube is truly the main place to be for your videos.
Getting Your Video to Rank
Google and other search engines are now doing what is called “universal search,” which means that they add other types of results to the search results, such as news, videos, images, or local results from Google Maps.
This means that if you have a video that has been uploaded to YouTube or other video sharing sites, that you want it to show up in searches on Google and other search engines related to your topic or business.
AimClear says that in nearly 100% of cases where a video was shown in search results on a search engine, that the video ranked on the first page of search results on its native platform, meaning on YouTube, MetaCafe, etc. That means that in order for your video to come up in search results for a given keyword, that it has to rank well, or come up high in search results on YouTube or other video sharing sites.
Google typically will show videos in universal search results in what are called “two-pack,” “three-pack,” and “four-pack” formations, where they show 2, 3, or 4 videos in one line going across. According to AimClear, 58% of the videos returned in search results were in the two-pack formation.
Keyword Intent
A recent article on Reelseo.com indicated that the intent of the keywords you use, in the text description that you upload with your video, affects how well your video will rank on the video sharing site.
Transactional Keywords, like “buy,” “cheap,” “free,” or “sale” may appeal to viewers, but they will not help with getting your video to rank well on YouTube or other sharing sites. Only 12% of videos that showed up in universal search results contained these transactional type keywords in the descriptions.
Navigational Keywords, containing the website address, brand names, and brand descriptions, did poorly also. Only 18% of videos that showed up in universal search results contained these navigational type keywords in the descriptions.
So what did do well?
Informational Keywords, like phrases that are comparative (this versus that), instructional (“how to” or “learn”), and educational (“what is” or “history of”), did very well. 84% of videos that showed up in universal search results contained these informational type keywords in the descriptions.
So when giving your video a title when uploading, and in writing your description text and tags, include informational keywords and steer clear of transactional keywords.
And as the article referenced above also states, “Make great videos – this is not from AimClear’s study, but still seems like good advice to me. With universal SERP (search engine results pages) real estate being so valuable, I doubt Google or Bing are going to let it become infected with poor quality video anytime soon.”
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Video Marketing 101
by John Eberhard
Since I started doing live action videos (shooting and editing into final form), I’ve been doing research lately on video marketing. Here are some initial results.
A recent study by Doubleclick found that people are 4-7 times more likely to respond to dynamic audio visual content than static content. This fits with my experience over the last few years in managing pay per click advertising, where I have found that we always got higher response when we put audio clips or video on our landing pages.
A Forester study found that email clickthrough rates were 2-3 times higher with video, i.e. when you link in the email to a video.
Marketing Sherpa found that viewers spend 8 times more time on video (1.5 minutes) than on static emails (10 seconds). And I’ll add that we’re talking about a link in the email to a video, as there is no reliable way to have a video actually play in the email itself.
Flimp.com reported that for their email campaigns involving video, the clickthrough rate was 32%.
Videos have 41% higher clickthrough rate than plain text in search results.
So I think we’ve established that adding video to your web site and into your marketing campaigns is a positive thing.
6 Types of Video
This is an excerpt from an article “The 6 ways your company should be using video” by Shana Fulle on Ragan.com.
“FAQ. Creating a frequently asked questions video will allow clients and customers to have easy access to their questions. A great FAQ can be the determining factor whether you are chosen over a competitor.
“Social media. Creating video blogs (vlogs) or including other useful and relevant video to your social media channels will not only enhance your brand image, but will also increase search engine optimization (SEO)—and your chances of being found over a competitor.
”Interviews. Interviewing your C-suite executives (top level execs, CEO, CFO, etc.) on camera is a great way to communicate the company's message. These videos are also perfect for establishing your brand as a thought leader in the industry. ”Video Tour. Online virtual tours have allowed people to see all aspects of an environment without having to be present. In 2010, 108 million Internet users viewed a Web-based tour. Creating a video tour is an inexpensive way to show potentially millions of people what you are offering, like a house or car for example. ”Testimonials. Drive your sales by boosting customer confidence with video testimonials. Posting your testimonial videos via multiple platforms will also increase your visibility and likelihood of appearing in search results. If that's not enough, these videos are also inexpensive and hold a long shelf life. ”Promotional. Along the same lines as a testimonial video, a promotional video can be taken even further. Create an animated video for your brand, an infomercial to showcase products, or develop a concept to promote an upcoming event.”Video can be in a couple of different formats, including a very simple Powerpoint style slide show video, with narration and music, photos, but no live action video. The pictures can move or zoom, but there is no actual live video in it. Then there is, of course, the live action video, which can have various degrees of complexity.
Getting Your Video to Show Up in Search
Google and other search engines are now doing what is called “universal search,” which means that they add other types of results to the search results, such as news, videos, images, or local results from Google Maps.
This means that if you have a video that has been uploaded to YouTube or other video sharing sites, that you want it to show up in searches on Google and other search engines related to your topic or business.
AimClear says that in nearly 100% of cases where a video was shown in search results on a search engine, that the video ranked on the first page of search results on its native platform, meaning on YouTube, MetaCafe, etc. In my next article I’ll cover how to get your article ranking well on the video sharing sites.
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