The Voice of Internet Marketing

Content Marketing for SEO refers to having an ongoing plan to continually add more pages of content to a website in order to increase search traffic over time. It is a strategy that will benefit the overall search rankings of a website in a number of ways.

1. By adding more pages to a website it will gain respect from the search engines. Sites with more pages (typically over 100) are viewed as authority sites and given better ranking for searches.

2. Adding fresh content on a regular basis will also improve the overall SEO of a website. The search engines love fresh content and if your website is continually adding more content it will rank higher than a site that remains stagnant or a long period of time.

3. The more pages that a website has, the more keywords that it can be targeting. As I written about previously, 35% of searches today are made up of 4 or more words and that trend is only going to increase. People are getting more defined in their searches and this opens up the opportunity to optimize for these longer keyword phrases. It also opens up the possibility of targeting timely search phrases based on current events.

For many companies the biggest road block to this type of strategy is coming up with new things to write about. We've developed a few different ways to help with this depending on the type of business and the level of involvement they want to have. There are some businesses that have a level of expertise required in their content only they can provide, but we can still assist them by providing them with a "content blueprint" to guide them. In other cases we can research and write effective content on their behalf without client involvement.

In today's world of internet marketing content is still king. Content marketing can be a cornerstone to an effective internet marketing plan.

The purpose of this article is to clearly point out that not all Search Engine Optimization Companies provide equal services and it's difficult for most people to truly differentiate them without help.  Some will make bold promises but never really explain how they plan to achieve them.  In reality, the nature of SEO services has changed dramatically over the past few years.  Gone are the days of having a programmer plug in some meta data and shazaam, you could be on page 1.  The execution of effective search engine optimization has evolved such that their are now more than 200 different factors that help determine where a page ranks.

The first step is to get to know your business.  I won't go into detail but if an internet marketing company starts to present solutions without first doing this you should be wary.  The next step that an SEO Consultant should be taking after they get a firm grasp on your business is keyword reseach.  Anyone can promise to get you onto page 1 of Google for a search term that nobody ever searches for.  Indepth research needs to be done to identify what people are searching for when they really want what you provide.  This is more complicated than most people think.  The trend is that more and more searches are 4 or more words long (35% of all searches) and we are finding that for every 1000 visitors to many optimized websites there are more than 500 different "keywords" that visitors searched for to get them there.  Understanding what keywords are most effective to go after and how competitive they are is critical.

One of the keys to effective SEO today is quality content, which may sound simple but in fact there are many factors that can be bundled under the heading quality content.  The amount of words on each page is important and so is the amount of repitition of the keyword phrase(s) that you are optimizing the page for.  If you wanted to optimized a page for SEO services Oakville and SEO services Burlington for example, to get the maximum respect/ranking from the search engines there is a targeted density of how often SEO services Oakville and SEO services Burlington should appear.  If that density is overdone the ranking gets penalized for trying too hard.  You also want to balance how much you are writing for the search engines versus how much you are writing for the visitor, it won't help you if you get page 1 ranking but everyone that gets there hates the content because it is totally written for the search engines.  Another content related factor is how fresh it is.  If the content is updated regularly then it is viewed by the search engines as more current and relevant which will have a positive influence on it's ranking.  Blogs can be an effective way to continually add fresh content, plus if the blog is actually part of your website it will also add more pages to your website - another factor that the search engines like.

One of the most challenging and also influential factors influencing page ranking is related to links. Search engines view links that point to your website as a vote of confidence that vouches for the importance and value of your website.  There are a wide variety of services that you can purchase related to link building and the phrase "you get what you pay for" fits very well here.  Not all links are created equal, in fact 1 high quality link can have a greater effect on your search results than 100 cheap links.  The differences relate to many things including the quality of the actual site that links to you and how the link is set up.

These are just a few of the factors to keep in mind when considering getting work done by one of the many Search Engine Optimization Companies out there, but it is only the tip of the iceberg.  Be sure to do your homework before you make your commitment, an educated choice will be money well spent.

As a follow up to my recent post on Banner Ads I thought I'd illustrate an actual comparison of Banner Ads vs Newspaper Ads.

The first question is why to I compare these 2 forms of advertising?  The answer is that if you think about it, banner ads are the digital equivalent of newspaper ads.  They are ads placed in places where people are reading news and information.

When you compare the difference in value between the 2 it's staggering. The Toronto Star's website states that their Business section gets 419,000 readers per weekday. The cost for a 1/8 page ad is about $5,000 (even a tiny 2" x 2" ad is $800). 
Compare that to banner ads where you can now get placement on prestigious sites like CNN but only have it show to viewers in your specified geographic area.  How does it compare to print?  For 10% of the cost ($500) you can get somewhere between 160,000 and 500,000 views of your ad.  The range is because there are variations in cost depending on the sites where the ad is placed.  How many of the 419,000 print readers of the business section even looked at the specific page your ad is on? For the banner ad that figure is 100%.  How can a reader respond to your ad?  With a banner they can immediately click through and respond, in print it is much more difficult for the reader to respond. The increased "friction" will reduce your return, in other words the more challenging you make it for a prospect to respond the less likely that they will.
We also have a very cool new "Re-marketing" feature that allows us to identify people that click through on our PPC ad and focus more attention on them by ensuring that they see our banners more often in the future. That way if someone is in the early stages of the buying cycle and visit your site, as they get closer to the final stages they'll be more exposed to your company.
I'm not by any means saying everyone needs to invest in banner advertising, but with some of the new innovations in how to target market banner ads I believe it is a useful tool that is a good fit for some businesses. I also believe any company that is currently investing in print advertising needs to look closely at it.  As always, feel free to contact us if you'd like more information.

Web Banners or Banner Ads as they are also called, are making a comeback. In the early days of the internet before Google ruled the world Web Banners were one of the first types of internet advertising. Things have changed over the years as Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search Advertising developed and took over, but a very interesting new product has emerged that is making Web Banners an interesting and attractive alternative again. That product is a new program that WSI has to offer that has taken Web Banner advertising to the next level.

What Are Web Banners?

Very simply they are ads that are usually graphic in nature that you see on many website, particularly bigger sites that get enough traffic to justify charging advertisers to place their ads on them. What's good about Web Banners is that you can get a very large amount of exposure cost effectively.  For example, an investment of $500 can get you up to 500,000 impressions. One problem with this type of advertising is how do you choose what websites to advertise on?  How do you simplify the management of your web ads on a bunch of different sites? How do you ensure that the right people are seeing your ad? These are all valid questions and in some cases the answers were a roadblock to using Web Banners effectively.  Today we have better answers.

Why Are Web Banners Back?

A solution that WSI has developed offers a whole new way to utilize banner advertising. First of all, we have built a network of many of the biggest and most popular websites in the world that we now can offer banner advertising on. Sites like CNN, Sports Illustrated, Business Week, Facebook, PC Magazine and many more are now accessible. The problem for many businesses is this, if your business serves only a specific geographic area like Southern Ontario for example then only a very small percentage of visitors to a worldwide site like CNN.com might be potential customers. WSI's new system will solve this problem. We can set up your campaign such that only visitors to these high profile websites that are in a specified geographic area will even see your banner ad. If you want to just target the GTA, then only people online in the GTA will see your ads.

This is just one of the new developments that the WSI banner program has to make it a more effective and attractive option. We have advanced capabilities that can enhance your other internet advertising as well. The bottom line is that advancements in technology have brought an old favorite back again, Web Banners are making a comeback!

Often times I find that all of the focus in internet marketing is on getting traffic to websites and not enough time is spent on how to turn website traffic into business. The fact is, the vast majority of website today are not effectively built to do it well. A big reason for this is that companies often will have a graphic designer, in house staff member, family member or friend design the website and not someone that is well versed in internet marketing. The end result can be a very pretty website that they think is wonderful, the problem is that it was not built with "Conversion Architecture" in mind.

"Conversion Architecture" is a term that was coined years ago by WSI and it refers to the art of designing websites that are built to convert website visitors into actual prospects. There are many aspects to this, far more than we can cover here. Some of the general areas of concern include content, positioning, calls to action, colour schemes, navigation and more. Even professional marketing companies that don't specialize in internet marketing are guilty of building websites that lack quality Conversion Architecture.

So how big of a difference can it make? Let me give you a scenario with real figures to explain. A client has a website and the average sale is worth $750 with a 20% margin for a profit of $150 per sale. Historically they averaged 1,000 visitors to their website per month with 5% of them inquiring and becoming a prospect (50 prospects) from which 20% convert into customers (10 customers). Their website generated $7,500 in revenue per month with a profit $1,500 per month. By incorporating effective conversion architecture they were able to increase the number of visitors that inquired and became a prospect from 1 out of 20 (5%) to 3 out of 20 (15%). That change alone tripled their revenues to $22,500 and profits to $4,500 per month.

In many cases the most cost effective way to increase revenue for your business isn't to get more traffic, it's to focus on how to turn the traffic that you have into business. You are welcome to contact me for more information on conversion architecture.

I thought I would write a brief post regarding a recent website traffic analysis I reviewed with a client.  The client in question is Budget Environmental Disposal Inc. and they have an established website that has been around for a number of years.  Budget Environmental is located in Hamilton, Ontario and their website is www.budgetbin.ca.  In the last 6 months we revamped the whole site and improved their search engine optimization and the results have been outstanding.  The part I wanted to focus on isn't necessarily how much we've helped them grow their online business, it's more to do with how people have been finding them.

Often I meet people that know about web analytics software and have Google analytics or something similar on their websites so they can measure their site traffic statistics.  Usually they don't even scratch the surface when they look at them.  For most of my customers I save them the time by providing them with the relevant information relating to their website's performance and I wanted to share some interesting information from a recent review I had.

First of all, Budget Environmental's core business of renting dumpsters is a seasonal, construction related business that ramps up in spring and historically peaks through the summer.  In March they had more than twice as many visitors to their site as they had in any month all of last year, and their busy season is just ramping up!  What I thought was really interesting though was what search terms were bringing people to the site, and the answer is too many to name.  Of the 799 visitors the found the site via search (excluding searches that included their company name) there were 555 different search terms.  And when I reviewed the top 100 of these terms I found that 34 of them were 4 words or more, almost exactly the industry average of 35% that I blogged about a little while ago.  People are trending towards longer and longer keyword searches, typing more specific details into the search bars than ever before.  Websites that are rich in quality content are the ones that will be more likely to capture these searchers and increase their business.

And for those people that are still considering the directories online to build traffic to their websites, this account still is listed online with yellowpages.ca and goldbook.ca and in the final analysis both of these brought them less than 1% of their traffic, a much lower return on investment without doubt.

But What Does It REALLY Mean?

A survey of 1,600 women on mobile phones has essentially given mobile shopping  applications a thumbs up. But what does this survey really mean? The numbers look impressive but they need to be taken in context, more about that later. The survey done by miBuys discovered that the vast majority of these women are open to more mobile marketing and shopping. The survey showed how mobile our internet surfing is becoming, 94% of these women said that they use their phone to surf even when they are at home and may have access to a PC or laptop. Some other interesting figures that came out of this survey include;

• 85% of them access Facebook, Twitter or similar Social Media sites via mobile phone
• 84% have noticed mobile marketing, and 57% have clicked on mobile advertising
• 67% are interested in receiving mobile coupons or vouchers
• 72% often do things on spur of the moment
• 73% often treat themselves to things they don't need
• 93% are always on the look-out for special offers

A Targeted Mobile Marketing Audience

This survey does paint a very rosey picture for mobile shopping applications and mobile advertising but I must frame these numbers with a word of caution, you must consider the source. First, the survey was done by miBuys - a company that provides mobile advertising services. I'm not saying I don't believe their information, but clearly they benefit from positive results which could create biases in how questions are framed. More importantly, the 1,600 women in the survey were women that responded to the survey via their mobile phones ONLY. Clearly this means the survey is made up of women on the highest end of the technology scale who would definitely respond more favourably to questions about mobile shopping applications.

These surveys results were reported on by the highly respected social media blogger "Mashable" with the headline "What a Girl Wants: More Mobile Shopping, Survey Says". No mention was made of the clear bias of the survey, the figures were presented in such a way that a casual observer would conclude that these statistics were a reflection of ALL women that have mobile phones. As a statistics major I am always looking for good numbers. But I'm also always looking for biases, making sure the numbers are true and accurate. There is no question that Mobile applications are the future, and for some specific markets you might even say they are the present. Clearly mobile shopping is in the early adoptor stage of development and for most companies there are other internet marketing initiatives that are a better investment today.

It's a question that I often raise early in discussions about internet marketing with potential customers. The fact is, most people don't know who is visiting their website. I am a firm believer that it is very difficult to improve something without first measuring, you need to know where you are today in order to understand the benefits gained by your efforts to improve.

I've also had situations where people have an answer to the question "who's visiting my website" but in fact it was a case of a little information being a dangerous thing. For example, I was once told "we have lots of traffic coming to our website, we don't need internet marketing, our website is working". They eventually agreed to allow me to install analytics on their website so we could get some real statistics and here is what I reported back to them a few months later. At first glance the fact that 61% of their visitors came via search engines seemed to support their claim, upon further analysis we found that 73% of the visitors that found their website via search actually used their company name in the search box. Of the remaining visitors that did find them via general search, 96% included the town of Milton in the search but virtually none of the searches included Oakville or Burlington, 2 other cities that are larger in population and in the clients target market.

I know that's a lot of statistics to throw at you, forgive me...the important thing to understand is that there is a lot to be gained by understanding and analyzing who is visiting your website.

This year's World Cup in South Africa will be the first of the "social media age" and with the passion of soccer fans around the world you can expect to see record levels of global interactivity.  It’s a sign of how fast technology moves today when you consider that Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were in their infancy during the last World Cup in Germany in 2006.  Today 50,000,000 Tweets are sent daily, there are more than 400,000,000 Facebook users and the number of videos viewed in a month has peaked at more than 33,000,000,000.  Staggering numbers considering how new these modes of communication are.

Social Media has the power to bring people together and this summer’s World Cup will see this reach new levels. FIFA has its own social-networking service on FIFA.com called "The Club" which itself has 1.6 million members. FIFA also plans to have upper echelon FIFA executives tweeting during the tournament.  It’s being predicted that the World Cup will eclipse everything we have seen so far on Twitter including the U.S. election, the Oscars or the Super Bowl, simply because it is so international. Already many fans are using the Twitter hash tag#WC2010 when they tweet about the World Cup.

Video sites will also see a surge in World Cup activity with thousands and thousands of uploads about the World Cup as soon as the games begin. You can also look forward to other more creative videos including parodies and mashups which are growing in popularity. You’ll even find videos where fans have put their camera on the TV and captured their own reaction to goals and other events of games. That last one sounds a bit pointless, but then again so did many Social Media innovations when they first started.

Hundreds of thousands of travelers scrambled to find alternative modes of transportation, last minute hotel bookings and even home-stays when the Icelandic volcano disrupted air travel around Europe over the last seven days. The official figure for airlines’ losses stands at $1.7 billion in just six days, with U.K.-based airlines British Airways and Virgin Atlantic likely to suffer the most.

Though it sounds like all doom and gloom, the silver lining of this crisis is that a lot of travelers looked to social media for help, and airlines and other authorities actually rose to the challenge. Here are some examples of winning information and customer service strategies that were implemented via social media.

Twitter Is Faster Than Call Centres

On April 15th, as airlines’ call centers got choked with frantic passengers, and most websites still were not updated with the latest flight delays, the term #ashtag was first used by Ireland-based Tweeter JL Pagano to note personal concerns and updates about the situation. It was very quickly adopted by a number of other travelers.

However, it was only when airlines started using #ashcloud on Twitter, along with their official updates, that the utility increased significantly. Suddenly, travelers were being informed of their flight status online. KLM and Lufthansa became the first major airlines to use the hashtag. It was then picked up by other airlines, like Air Baltic and British Airways, who started using it to update their customers as well.

In just seven days, there were over 55,000 mentions of #ashtag, and the usage was so widespread that only 5.8% of the tweets came from the Top 10 users –- which is generally not the case.

Airlines not only updated flight statuses, but provided customer service as well, bringing down volume on their call centers. Air Baltic even confirmed with some passengers that their hotel expenses would be covered –- all this as a public conversation.

The most impressive efforts, surprisingly, came from the authorities at EuroControl, the European air safety organization, which did a phenomenal job at crisis management. It was probably the best effort I’ve seen in aviation crisis management through social media.

On their homepage, they had updated maps of where the ash was coming from, where it was going, and the implications. But live website updates are common. They truly excelled by providing consistent and useful information for travelers on their Facebook Fan Page, Twitter feed, and even through relevant aviation groups on LinkedIn(). Moreover, they liberally used the Twitter hashtags #euva and #ashtag to keep customers informed. Soon enough, the customers themselves started sharing stories and tips using these hashtags.

This is when #getmehome became popular. People started to publicly offer stranded travelers rides, places to stay, and breakfast. Complete strangers were lending a hand to those in need via social media.

Facebook To The Rescue

The community effect extended to Facebook as well, where airlines took charge of the situation.

Rather than wait on hold endlessly for a chance to reschedule your flight, if your ticket was booked with SAS Scandinavian, forget the phone and head to their Facebook Page, where an impromptu effort to address every single wall post turned into a full-scale customer service strategy.

To quote one person from this stealth team at SAS, “Now we have people (volunteers!) online from about 5 a.m. to 2 a.m. Most of the time there are 3-5 people working, and using the Microsoft Communicator to chat with the other members of the team, discuss issues, and make sure only one person answers a customer’s question. In total, I think about 15-20 people in both Oslo and Stockholm have been involved directly updating social media since Thursday. In terms of fans, we went from 15,000 Thursday morning, to having passed 21,000 today.”

EuroControl’s Fan Page became the leading provider of the latest information on Facebook, and other airlines like Virgin Atlantic linked their official website updates to their Facebook Fan Page, where customers discussed, commented, and offered tips.

When it comes to social media strategy, most European airlines tend to lag behind their American counterparts like JetBlue and Southwest. But in this situation, they got the basics of crisis management right by jumping straight in.

Both airlines and EuroControl took charge of the situation not just by sending out messages, but by leading and participating in conversations. Airlines like SAS quickly learned how to scale up the efforts when needed, with the help of volunteers from across the company. And the next time a crisis occurs, they will be much better prepared to use social media as a valuable information and customer service tool. The most important thing right now is to take the lessons learned and develop a coherent strategy for handling future crises.

Shashank Nigam is the CEO of SimpliFlying.com, an award-winning blog on airline branding, and is the source of this post.