Search Engines: Local, Regional or National?

By John Eberhard

I was recently talking to a guy who was interested in getting a new web site created. One of the questions he asked was “What about SEO (search engine optimization)?”

At that point my first question to him was “Is your business a local business?” Because if it is a local business, that changes the priorities of what you need to do in order to get your business to appear on search engines.

The Local Business

We will define a local business as any business that services customers or clients mainly or only in one city or metro area. Some examples are restaurants, dentists, chiropractors, doctors, or home improvement companies.

Google Maps, also called Google Places, has completely changed the landscape of search engine ranking and appearance for local businesses. Google started Google Maps a bit over a year ago.

Now, for any type of local search where Google can see that it is a local type of listing, it shows Google Maps information. That consists of a map (with red balloons showing where the local businesses in this category appear) which now appears in the right hand column, and individual listings, marked with a red balloon, in the wider left hand column.

Google typically displays 8-10 listings on the first page. This means essentially that for a local type of listing, like “dentist Glendale” or “restaurant Sylmar” (or even just “restaurant,” because Google knows what city you’re in) the Google Maps information completely dominates the first page.

So that really changes the picture of what a local business needs to do to rank well on Google. Instead of trying to rank well on Google’s organic (non-paid) listings for a term like “Italian restaurant,” in which you would be competing with other Italian restaurants worldwide, you now just have to get your restaurant appearing in Google Maps, and you just have to compete with other Italian restaurants in your local city.

So what do you have to do to get a listing on Google Maps and compete effectively with other local businesses in your area?

1. First of all you have to get a listing on Google Maps. Just because you have a Gmail account or Google AdWords or AdSense or Google Analytics account does NOT necessarily mean you automatically have a Google Maps account. If there is one up there (Google put up thousands of listings for businesses) then you have to claim it. There is a procedure for how to do that.
2. Next you have to get a lot of what are called “citations.” These are essentially listings of your business on other sites, like Yahoo Maps, Bing Maps, Yelp, Hotfrog, and others. This helps to push your Google Maps listing toward the top. And believe me, in some cities and in some industries, there is a lot of competition.
3. Get lots of online reviews. These are where someone goes to one of the review sites, logs in or signs up for an account there, and writes a review on your business. For example, you have to have a Gmail or AdWords or Analytics or other type of Google account to write a review on Google. For an idea of how many reviews you need to get, look at the businesses that are showing up in your industry and in your area, on page one of Google Maps listings, and see how many reviews they have. We have developed systems to help clients get online reviews.

Regional or National Businesses

For regional or national businesses, the way to get your business to appear high on search engines, is either through:

1. Search engine optimization and link building, or
2. Pay per click advertising

Search engine optimization (SEO) is something you do once, or every three years or so. First you do research on potential keywords, and find ones that have decent amount of people searching for them, but a low number of sites competing for them. This usually ends up being what we call “long tail keywords,” meaning more detailed keyword phrases of more than one word. In most cases, single word keywords will have very high competition and you just won’t be able to compete or rank well for them.

Next you select the best keywords to work on, and put those into appropriate places on the pages of your web site, including into the titles and descriptions that appear on Google when your organic listing comes up.

Next you have to build up links to your web site on other web sites. Google says the number of links to your web site from other sites is the most important criteria for how well your site will rank for any given keywords. This does not mean writing to webmasters and offering to trade links. That is called reciprocal link building and Google discounted the value of it over three years ago. Amazingly some consultants still recommend it and do it.

The best ways we have found to do link building are:

1. Writing articles on your topic and submitting them to article directories. We have ways of making each one count as more than one link.
2. Writing press releases about your company and submitting them to online PR sites and putting them on blogs
3. Setting up accounts on free blogs and posting your articles and press releases on all of them, including several keywords in each article or release that are linked back to your site

So the first thing you have to do is determine if your business is local, regional or national. That will then define your direction for search engines.

 

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My Marketing Story

by John Eberhard

I have been reading a couple of books lately that say that to create what they call “remarkable content,” you have to tell a story. So at the risk of boring everyone to tears I am going to tell the story of how I got involved in marketing and what it hopefully has taught me.

I didn’t sit in my room when I was a kid, dreaming of becoming a marketing consultant. I know that will shock everyone. I was into the arts as a kid. I drew, I painted, I did photography, I built things (I built my own toys), and I played music. After I saw Buddy Rich play when I was about 12, I decided I wanted to be a drummer, and to become rich and famous. I excelled at music in high school and ended up going to Berklee College of Music in Boston for two years and excelled there too.

After college I stayed in Boston and started playing music, but I also decided to work during the day for my church doing public relations. I started writing press releases, going out and doing “press runs” to the media, holding events, holding press conferences, appearing as a guest on TV and radio shows, and even hosting my own talk show on a cable TV station in Worcester, MA.

I really dug the fact of being able to communicate to thousands of people at one time. That was a kick.

Then I met my future wife, played music full time for a few years, and moved to Los Angeles. Unfortunately the music thing did not work out well for me in LA. But somehow I fell into marketing. I still remembered that thing about how I liked communicating to thousands of people, but I had not really liked the media people, who by and large are kind of slimey (i.e. you can’t trust them as far as you can throw them).

I saw an ad in the paper for a Marketing Director. I thought about it and decided “yeah, I could do that.” I worked as a marketing director for a year at a market research company and then moved to a medium-sized software company. I was the market research manager there and then was promoted to be in charge of marketing for North America. This was real on-the-job-training stuff, and I did a large course in marketing at the company’s training facility.

I soon learned that what I loved about marketing was twofold: a) I loved the fact that I could communicate to thousands of people, send out something to them and get them to respond (without dealing with the skeevy media people), and b) there are a lot of creative elements in marketing. There is copywriting, which is fun and creative, and design is of course very creative. And it was fun coming up with a campaign and planning it out and causing a big effect, i.e. lots of leads coming in and sales being made.

So I continued doing that for a number of years, working for a number of companies as Marketing Director or VP Marketing. I learned early on that you have to be aggressive in marketing and willing to communicate on a grand scale. And sometimes you have to fight for money to keep the promo going out, because some people will want to cut the funds for it when things get tight. And that is exactly when you should not cut the funds.

After working at those companies and being on the finance and management committees, I figured I’d learned enough about business to start my own. I started my own marketing consulting company part time while still working full time as an employee.

Then three years ago this month, I got laid off from my full time job. In some of the months prior to that, I had made almost as much money from the part time business as I had from my full time job. My wife and I looked at it, and decided to take the plunge. The company that I had been working for full time hired us out of the gate to do some of their marketing, and Real Web Marketing Inc. was born.

There have been ups and downs, and challenging periods when the economy seemed to be kicking our butts. But I remembered the lessons I had learned many years ago, that you have to keep promoting, and be aggressive, and not be afraid to communicate on a grand scale. As a result we have started to really expand our operations lately. And since I really enjoy it, especially the creative aspects, it’s been fun. And especially that being your own boss thing.

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Measuring Success with Social Media

by John Eberhard

I have started doing a lot of social media marketing work for clients where I add friends, followers and connections to their Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. I was adding friends for them on MySpace too but have recently discovered that hardly anyone is using MySpace anymore, so I am dropping that from the mix.

All this got me thinking about how you should measure your success with social media. I found an excellent article on this called “3 Key Metrics To Measure Social Media Success” by Clay McDaniel on SearchEngineWatch.com. I’ll explain and simplify what he is saying, plus add some additional ways of my own to measure social media success. Here are McDaniel’s 3 key metrics:

1. Total Online Community Size: Add up your total Facebook fans of your fan page and/or friends for your profile, Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, YouTube channel subscribers, and blog unique users.

In my opinion this is one of the most important metrics in terms of how well you are doing, because it gives the total number of people you can reach with your social media communications. This is also something you should be working on regularly to increase these numbers.

2. Monthly Referred Traffic to Site: Go into Google Analytics and see how many total people came to your site, referred from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

If you are posting status updates on your social media accounts that link back to your site or mention things you are doing, this should be generating traffic, i.e. people clicking on the link and coming to your site.

3. Social Monthly Impressions: This is the number of times someone mentions your company or brand on social media sites. You can set up a Google Alert to measure this.

I recently found that posting press releases on two specific online PR sites caused over 150 people to tweet the title of my press release and link to it from their Twitter accounts. I found this out by searching for my company name on Twitter.

Here are some additional ways of my own to measure what is going on with social media:

4. Status Updates Out Monthly: This is a total of how many times you sent out a business related status update to all your social media accounts. This is of course what you are doing rather than how people are responding to you. But I think this should be tracked because it is one of the main things you are doing that will affect how people respond. See my article from last week on what you should put out.

5. Blog Posts Monthly: This is the number of posts you are putting out on your blog or blogs. As mentioned in earlier articles the ideal frequency of this is once a week or more.

Good luck with your social media marketing.

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Your Social Media Outflow Strategy

by John Eberhard

Last week I talked about how you should engage with your friends, followers and connections on social media, and respond to their communications.

But what type of communications should you put out in your own status updates, i.e. the communications that go out to all your social media connections?

Well first of all I have recommended in the past that you set up an account on www.Ping.fm and connect up all your social media accounts to it. That way when you post something on Ping.fm, it goes out to all your social media accounts and you don’t have to log into a bunch of accounts to send your message. That saves a lot of time.

But back to what you should say. Your strategy of course will have to work with your personality and what you feel comfortable saying in your social media marketing. But here are some tips.

1. I have had a successful strategy with regard to my business, whereby I post messages saying what I am working on at the time, such as “I am setting up a new Google AdWords account for a client,” or “I am designing a new web site for a veterinarian,” or “I am adding more Twitter followers for a client.” I was telling a friend about this recently and his reaction was “Isn’t that really boring?” I suppose you could say that it is. But what it does do is create good “top of mind awareness.” That’s where when someone thinks of an Internet marketing consultant, I’m one of the guys they think of. I have gotten substantial business from social media using this strategy. You may be able to use this strategy to create top of mind awareness for your company.

2. Every time you post new content on your blog, you should put out a status update saying “See my new blog post,” then the name of your article, then a link to it. Since the number of characters you get on Twitter (and Ping.fm) is only 140, it makes sense to use a URL shortener for the address of the article, such as www.goo.gl.

3. If your company puts up a new video on YouTube, post an update about it with a link to the video.

4. If you publish a press release on your web site or blog, post an update about this with a link to it.

5. I have one client where I put together client testimonials for him and post them on his web site. Every time one of these goes up, I post a status update about it to his social media accounts.

6. If your company releases any type of special report or white paper related to a topic within your industry, post a link to it. Usually these are offered in such a way that the person has to give you his name and email to get the report, as a method of lead generation. So post a link to the signup page.

7. You can post a link to some interesting article or video you found relating to your industry.

8. Whenever you have an event coming up, like a seminar, class, speech, webinar, or appearance at a trade show, post something announcing it.

9. If you are having a sale or special, you should definitely post about it, possibly several times.

10. Avoid making every single status update a pitch for your business. While you should post about all your seminars, classes, speeches, webinars, or trade show appearances, if all you ever post are pitches for your promotional actions, it could cause people to tune you out or even hide your posts or unfriend you. I think it is helpful to throw in some personal stuff, like a trip you’re taking, or a sports event or concert you attended.

It is definitely a good idea to post status updates to your social media accounts frequently. It all comes under the heading of creating top of mind awareness. Using these tips you can increase your posting frequency.

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RealWebMarketing.net Launches New Site for Marketing for Landscapers

Site to Offer Landscaping Companies Web Design, Pay Per Click, and Google Maps

LOS ANGELES: RealWebMarketing.net (http://www.realwebmarketing.net), a web design and website marketing company based in Southern California, has just launched a new web site called Landscaper-Marketing.com (http://www.landscaper-marketing.com) offering online marketing services specifically for landscaping companies.

 

The new website offers landscaping companies web design, pay per click advertising setup and maintenance, and Google Maps setup and maintenance.

 

John Eberhard, President of RealWebMarketing.net, stated, “This is a vital time of year for landscape designers and contractors across the U.S., because their biggest time of the year and biggest surge of business is in the spring and early summer. So now is the ideal time for them to get their web site re-designed if it needs it, and to promote using pay per click advertising or getting a listing up on Google Maps. Promoting your business is never more important than in a time of economic downturn like we’re seeing today. The key is promoting more, not cutting back.”

 

RealWebMarketing.net recently launched a new major web re-design for Big Trees Inc., (http://www.bigtreesupply.com) a large tree nursery in the Seattle area, and is now managing pay per click advertising and link building for Big Trees.

 

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 direct mail, health care, consulting, construction, personnel recruitment, court reporting, drug rehabilitation, publishing, software, jewelry manufacturing and online sales, residential and commercial real estate, dance instruction, tax consulting, plumbing, dentistry, 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.

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Social Media Engagement

by John Eberhard

In past articles I’ve talked about the necessity of getting lots of friends, followers and connections on social media sites, if you want to use them effectively for marketing purposes.

But there is another important point that is vital in effectively using social media sites to market. That is your amount of engagement with others on social media sites. By engagement in this case I mean “interacting back and forth with people on the social media sites.”

The idea is that you are not just outflowing information or messages to your friends, followers or connections on sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. You should be viewing what other people are doing or saying and interacting with them about it.

I was talking to a friend about this recently and I could tell he thought it would be a daunting task, i.e. that it would take him too much time. But I think it is important if you want to get much benefit from social media sites, and I don’t think it has to take a lot of time. Here are some examples:

1. On Facebook, click on “Home,” then at the top click on “Most Recent.” This brings up a feed of things that your Facebook friends have posted, including short blurbs about what they are doing, comments on things, links to articles elsewhere on the web, pictures they have uploaded, or links to videos on YouTube. Quickly scroll through this feed to look for things that interest you. If someone has posted a blurb or comment that you agree with, click the “Like” button underneath that post. Or post a short comment on it yourself. Similarly if someone has posted a link to an article or video that you like or agree with, click the “Like” button or post your own comment. It is easy to spend excessive time on this but you should discipline yourself and make it take no more than 5 minutes a day. When you click the “Like” button or post a comment on someone else’s content, they receive an email. It shows them that you give a hoot about them and it’s not all about you.

2. On Facebook, in the upper right area of the page is a list of your Facebook friends for whom today is their birthday. Review this list and for anyone who is a real life friend, click through to their page and where it says “Write something,” write a quick “Happy birthday Joe” message.

3. On Facebook there are groups or fan pages you can find about areas of interest or about your industry. Click “like” on some of these groups and follow or join in the discussions that appear on their fan pages.

4. Facebook has its own email system. Read any Facebook email you get and reply to it.

5. On Twitter, you can spend a few minutes following the posts of other people that you are following, then “re-tweet” the ones you like (that means to send that particular post again out to all of your followers). Or you can send them a direct message via Twitter.

6. Set up folders in your email program and set up mail rules that will dump all Facebook emails into a folder for Facebook and all Twitter emails into a folder for Twitter. That way they do not clutter up your main inbox and you can handle those emails when you have time.

7. On Twitter, you will receive emails that say “Direct message from Joe Jones.” Unfortunately a lot of these will be automatically generated messages that others send out whenever someone follows them, most saying “Thanks for following me. Look forward to reading your messages.” Some will include a link to something they are pitching. I think whoever invented the auto direct messages on Twitter should have a special seat reserved for them in a very hot place, next to that guy who invented that sticky tape along the top of a CD jewel case. The auto direct message is an unfortunate thing you have to put up with. But be on the lookout for any direct messages from others who are actually communicating to you. Reply to them.

8. One thing you can do on Twitter is do a search for your company name or brand, and see what people are saying about you. Then respond to them or re-tweet their stuff if it is positive. If it’s negative, it gives you a chance to monitor any problems and respond to them.

The web, and especially social media sites, are all about interaction, a conversation, back and forth. In the days before the web and social media, most companies were used to putting out communications that their public or consumers would receive. The public could write them a letter but most people never did that.

Today with social media it is much easier for people to write back to a company, or to comment about it. It’s vital, especially as your company expands, to be aware of what people are saying and to respond and be engaged in conversation.

But even beyond managing your public relations, it is best to engage with others on social media sites. By showing interest in your online friends and what they are saying and in responding to their communications, it ensures they will show more interest in you.

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Landing Pages

by John Eberhard

I was recently using some software to do research on the competitors for one of my clients, companies that are competing against my client on Google AdWords. I was amazed to find that these companies were having the visitors click through and then land on their home page.

I figured out years ago that this was not the best thing to do. But now it is considered pretty much common knowledge in pay per click advertising and in other forms of promotion such as email marketing, that you do not have the visitor land on your home page.

You create your ad on Google AdWords so that when the searcher clicks on your ad, he then lands on a customized landing page that you created just for that purpose. Or if you are doing email marketing, you put a link at the bottom of your email for people to click on, that goes not to the home page of your site but to a special landing page that you created just to go along with that email.

There are a number of reasons why it is better to make a customized landing page that your visitors will land on:

1. The content will match. In other words, the content of your Google AdWords ad will exactly match the content of the page they land on.

1. People don’t have to search for what they are looking for on your site. You want them to land on a landing page that is exactly about what they want. Your home page will usually not be about that, and so if you land them on the home page they will have to look over your navigation and figure out where to go. Many will get exasperated and leave.

   If your company offers more than one product or service (most do), then most likely you will have more than one campaign on Google AdWords, each one advertising one specific product or service. Then each one of those campaigns should click through to a customized landing page that is specifically about that one product or service.

So what should and should not be on a customized landing page for pay per click or email?

1. It should look like your web site and have the same header at the top with your logo and all that.

1. It should have sales copy on it, as well as some pictures showing the product or service.

1. The landing page should NOT have navigation buttons on it. When I first set up pay per click campaigns for clients, this one gets the most questioning and disagreement. The whole purpose for a pay per click or email landing page is that you want the person to do something. Usually you want him to become a lead or a sale. You want him to fill out the form or call you.

   I’ve been doing email marketing for about 11 years and pay per click advertising for about 6 years. I can tell you that in that time I have seen that in about 90% of the time, it works better NOT to have navigation buttons or links anywhere on the landing page. Meaning statistically you get more leads or sales (depending on what your campaign is trying to do) if you leave the navigation off.

   The problem with putting navigation buttons on a landing page for pay per click or email is that the visitor will be more likely to just wander around your site, then leave. It is not enough of a tightly controlled situation. You have to control the situation better than that and that means you want to give the person one option of what to do when he is done reading that page, which is to contact you via filling out that form or calling you.

1. The page should have a form at the bottom for the person to fill out. Do not make the person click through to another page to fill out a form unless you can’t avoid it, like if you need for him to go to a shopping cart that is on a different site. Also include a phone number so he can call right now if he wants to. Some people argue against putting a form on the landing page, but I am always in favor of it. For one thing, this is important for people who are checking out your site on the weekend or late at night, when they can’t call you. I also think a form is better than an email link. I used to put email links on sites, but lately have been noticing that I get complaints on these because they won’t work for people who use Gmail or Yahoo, which is a lot of people today. So a form is best.

1. Some people think that a really long page with lots of copy is best, stuffed with lots of testimonials and all that. I’m not so sure this is the best route anymore, as people online are more and more in a hurry these days. Many times they will just read a little bit and then scroll to the bottom, skipping five feet worth of testimonials, to see “how much is the thing?!” You can test it both ways but I am generally seeing that shorter landing pages work better these days. Make your case, then give them the form.

1. Multimedia: I generally find that some sort of multimedia on a landing page helps conversions, i.e. the percentage of people that contact you. This can include an audio file that starts talking to them as soon as the page loads, or a video, or a Flash slide show. Statistically I find that these things help conversions, which is the name of the game.

Following these points, you will be more likely to have success with your pay per click or email campaigns.

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