Posts Tagged ‘ Google ’

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011 - by Jack - No Comments

Mobile Commerce is Big Business for Small Business

Below are some current statistics about mobile web. If you are a local business owner that depends on getting any number of customers from the internet, you need to have amobile website!

  • 65% of mobile users said they used their mobile device to find a business to make an in-store purchase (Source: Google, 2011)
  • 43% of mobile shoppers have downloaded a retail app (Source: Retrevo, 2011)
  • Approximately 52 % of smartphone users will use their device to research products, redeem coupons and use apps to assist in their holiday gift purchase (Source: Acquity Group, 2011)
  • 67% of consumers plan to make a purchase via mobile this holiday season (Source: PayPal, 2011)
  • In terms of the types of information mobile users will be looking for via their devices this holiday season, 31 % said they will look for updates on sales and promotions, 27% will look for local store hours and directions, 26 % will seek out product information and availability, 26 % will be interested in product photos, 18% will search for official retailer apps and 17 % will use mobile for customer support. (InMobi Holiday Mobile Shopping Study)
  • Approximately 45 % of mobile users plan to compare prices via their handsets during their Thanksgiving weekend shopping, up from 22 percent in 2010 (InMobi Holiday Mobile Shopping Study)
  • 67% of consumers will use their smartphones to find store locations, 59% to compare prices, 51% to obtain product information, 46% to check product availability, 45% to read reviews, 45% to shop online, 41% to find and use coupons, 40% to scan bar codes, and 35% to access social media (Source: Deloitte’s 2011 Annual Holiday Survey)
  • More than 60 % of mobile buyers will make mobile purchases while at home (Source: Ipsos and PayPal Survey, 2011)
  • 53% of the “on-the-go” U.S. audience is willing to exchange their location in exchange for more relevant content and better information, including mobile deals (Source: JiWire, 2011)
  • 74 million consumers in the United States already shop from their mobile devices (Source: InMobi study, 2011)
  • 78 percent of retailers plan to invest in mobile this year (Source: The E-tailing Group Inc, 2011)
  • Within the 49% of mobile users who have made a mobile purchase in the last six months, 84% look for local retailer reputation, 82% find online retailers, 73% find a specific manufacturer or product website, 71% learn about a product or service after seeing an ad, 68% find the best price for a product or service, and 63% search before purchasing in a store or from a catalog (Source: Performics 2011 Mobile Search Insights Study, conducted by ROI Research)

 

Thursday, September 29th, 2011 - by Jack - 2 Comments

Increase Your Local Business Using the Interent

Internet marketing is critical to any local business. Here are the five things every local business should do before considering spending a dime on Internet marketing:

  1. Know what people actually search for to find your business: Search engines have far less to do with computers and more to do with language. Google provides a free tool for finding out what the most popular searches are for your type of business: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

    The tool allows you to enter the keywords you think are the best for your business and it will tell you the top 50 or so related terms along with statistics for ranking them. Using the 80/20 rule, make a list of the top 20 keywords related to your business.

    CRITICAL NOTE: Add the cities within your service area to the list. If you don’t know all of the cities within a county, search for the county name on wikipedia.org and they will provide you with a list of every incorporated city within the county.

  2. Put the keywords into your site where the search engines can find them. If you want to be found for “purple people eaters” then the words better be in your site where the search engines can associate them with your business. Here are the short-cut methods for making sure the search engines know what your business is about:

    1. a. Create a unique title meta tag for each of your site’s main pages using a maximum of 60 characters. Includes your top cities as well.

      EXAMPLES: Lifetime Fence Company – Lewisville | Flower Mound | Denton – or – AC & Heat Solutions | Air Conditioning and Heating | Hurst

b. Create unique description meta tags for each of your site’s main pages using a maximum of 200 characters. Incorporate top keywords and cities so that between all of the pages each is used at least once.

EXAMPLE: JBC Custom Remodeling is your Real interior and exterior expert serving the DFW Metroplex including Dallas, Fort Worth, Richardson, Plano, Frisco, Highland Park, Irving, Lewisvile, Flower Mound.

c. Create two paragraphs. The first tells what you do and includes the top 20 keywords. The second tells where you do it. Length does not matter.

EXAMPLE: The best selection of durable home medical equipment in Denton County including: oxygen supplies, sleep therapy (CPAP & BiPAP), Wheelchairs, lifts and walkers, compression therapy systems, incontinent supplies, diabetic shoes and supplies, foot orthotics and custom orthopedic devices, hospital beds, physical therapy supplies, rehab mobility aids, breast prosthesis and bras, bathroom safety equipment and personal care items.

Over 30 years in Denton county and conveniently located near: Lewisville, Flower Mound, Corinth, Hickory Creek, Denton, Highland Village, Lake Dallas, Coppell, Corinth, Argyle, Aubrey, Bartonville, Carrollton, Copper Canyon, Dallas, Double Oak, Hebron, Justin, Plano, Ponder, Prosper, Shady Shores, Southlake, Trophy Club, and Westlake.

Add the paragraphs to EVERY page in very small text in the footer (the bottom where the copyright info typically is). This information is for the search engines and not designed to impress customers, so do not worry about making it sound consumer-friendly.

  1. Add an interactive map to your Contact page using the code from either Google or Mapquest. Search engines look specifically for this code on a site to help determine whether it is addressed to local prospects or national. For instance, eBay, Amazon and Dell do not include maps on their site because they are national. Your site should, because you are local.

  1. Take ownership of your local business listings in places like Google Maps, Yahoo! Local and Bing Local. According to SearchEngineWatch.com, up to 24% of a local business’s new customer contacts can come from a Google Maps listing alone. Make sure your listing accurately reflects your business. Claimed listings with a web address are known to show higher in ranking than unclaimed listings.

  2. Make asking for online reviews a part of your everyday business. Nearly every online business directory allows consumers to leave reviews. Many even uses the quantity of reviews as a factor for ranking the listings. If you think about human nature, a significantly higher percentage of people who are upset with a business will leave a review than the percentage of satisfied customers. Protect yourself from a bad review by making sure you have multiple good reviews.

The top review sites are:

Google Maps

Yahoo! Local

Insiderpages

Citysearch

Yelp

Make the most of these 5 recommendations and you’ll start seeing results in often less than a month. Done properly, any business can be on the first page of localized search results – and stay there – within 4~6 months.

Monday, September 26th, 2011 - by Jack - 272 Comments

Lately my news feed has brought up a topic that has been in the news – search engine optimization. When I’m thinking of buying a vaporizer, I sometimes look at sites online to gain some knowledge about optimizing for Google. There’s been a lot of different thoughts in this arena at the moment. It’s been many months of up and downs for many sites. Lots of the standard old truths of SEO seem to no longer apply.

One thing in particular that appears less important lately is links from forum profiles. People used to believe you could fill the web with a plethora of these things. What they do is make a link with your desired anchor text on a website with decent Page Rank. Yet, the actual URL itself that contains the link would still be PR0. So people would put up many of these types of links. Yet, it is pretty safe to say that the Google search engine has figured out this strategy by this point. As a result they don’t help out your ranking very much.

Another type of backlink that is only moderately effective is sidebar links. Those are links located within the sidebar of the referring domain. They are nice to have, especially if they have some PR juice to pass. However, they are not the best type of link to have. The Google search engine can detect they are not part of an actual article, and the link is on every single page of the linking site. Thus Google puts less value on these. Don’t get me wrong, these links are not completely worthless. It’s good to have some as part of your overall strategy.

This brings us to the ideal type of backlink: contextual home page links. This means they are links that are found within some text that is actually about the same subject as your web page. Best case scenario, you’d like the anchor text of the backlink to be the keyword you are trying to rank. It’s important that this backlink be on a page that has high PR. Most often this will be the home page of the site. The main page should have the most link value of any page on the site. However if your backlinks are found on another inner page that has PageRank, that is almost as effective. If this appears tough to get, I recommend you check out a silver surfer vaporizer review.

Therefore, it’s no longer just about the number of backlinks going to your site. You have to look at the quality of the links that refer to your site. You definitely should have some high PR contextual links in your overall link profile.

The expression, website usability, has been around for quite a few years, and yet it is something that appears to be hardly discussed in the more heavily trafficked marketing forums. But it is interesting because it is an area of critical importance to the good results of any business website. The meaning of this word is intuitive, and if visitors have difficulty using any aspect of your site then that isn’t ideal. As you know, you absolutely want both in your corner if you want to succeed on the net. There is a lot to think about depending on the nature of your site, and the best way to approach this is to have information about what is happening.

So you realize the importance of knowing visitor behavior, and you will use a good tracking script for getting that done. That is all we are able to do, for the most part, and then we analyze and make our most educated guess, often times, as to what the issue may be. We know that isn’t terribly high tech, but that’s the state of where things are at, right now. Many tracking scripts are extremely simple, and of course you can use something powerful like Google Analytics. A tracking script tracks site visitors; they all do that but some have a lot more cool bells and whistles. Just several important areas include how long people remain on your pages as well as where they enter and leave from. We think it is worth it to use a superior quality script so you’ll have a greater idea about your site.

You realize the value of optimization for conversions, and that is all this is about. You can optimize your site for any number of ideal actions including conversion rates; both an opt-in or a sale. In order to see what works, you will employ specific kinds of tests. As you may know, there is basic A/B split testing as well as Taguchi multivariate testing. Most sites are not necessarily well-suited for Taguchi multivariate testing due to the fact it requires a lot more performance. Where you begin and what you test is up to you, and there are typical items that people tend to test, too. Nevertheless, if you are tracking and notice visitors are constantly exiting on the same page, then that is a huge clue that something on that page is causing them to leave. The smart approach to optimization and testing is to find out where your site is weak so you can correct it.

There is no doubting about the worth of testing and usability general performance evaluation. However, the long term benefits will be worth the time and inconvenience to do it. When your site is fully optimized, your desired conversions will be the very best they can be. That only spells more profits and long term business for you.

I would like to open by pointing out the Importance of making use of information advertising and your personal distinctive content online, and strategically placing it all over the internet to obtain masses of targeted and ready to purchase visitors back to your site.

The secret of gaining masses of free of charge targeted site visitors to your site is via the use of details in a lot of various methods. Now just let that above statement sink in… “MASSES OF Totally free TARGETED TRAFFIC” to YOUR website!

The importance of getting targeted visitors to your site is immense, regardless of whether you are a local company owner, or somebody selling goods, services, e-products on-line nationally or globally. You can have the very best darn website within the world, but in the event you don’t have traffic, it will not do you one iota of excellent… Hence the need for an informational based advertising method, where you mix free of charge techniques, guerilla strategies and paid strategies all in 1.

How do you do this?

There is a myriad of processes it is possible to begin implementing by using existing info and re-working it, and then spreading the new versions all over the web and your local organization location offline.

Here are some of the most effective methods to go about it:

1. Write-up Advertising – If you have brochures, videos, audios and white papers already, you are able to take that and repurpose the message it contains into original, high-quality content in written form and spread it throughout the web via cost-free write-up hubs. In the event you go to Google and sort in write-up hubs, or submit articles on the web, you will find several them to submit to, you may also attempt typing into Google “Top 50 Write-up Hubs” and see what comes back.

Whenever you generate an write-up, it doesn’t need to be super-duper, however it does have to include some exceptional content and information that the readers can take and use, preferring in a “step-by-step” sequence, Marlon Sanders is very very good at performing this with his step-by-step guidance in totally free articles, reports, audios and videos.

The single most critical write-up hub you’ll want to focus on above and beyond the rest is EzineArticles.com. The secret here is to write 10 great high quality, longer than 500 word articles (far more like 1000 to 1500 words) and submit them, with the aim of becoming a premium author and standing out as an professional in your field, that’s the power of excellent high quality articles on your niche.

2. Audio / Podcast Advertising – When you have articles amassed and submitted, you go to step 2, which is making audios of the articles, perhaps you just read the post, or have an interview based around the content of each post it’s entirely up to you.

The very same process then applies, it is possible to submit your audio to any number of podcast hubs, which when again is cost-free, you can also approach other websites that have an informational style approach and give that interview to them for some additional exposure, some will interview you and other people you might never hear back from, you just will need to be authentic within your approach to the webmasters and explain what you are looking at performing, and how you wish to create “VALUE” to their site.

If you speak when it comes to developing value for a webmaster, and how what you’ve got and them offering it to their list can help them, you’ll have significantly a lot more of a opportunity of finding accepted.

For instance, you may call up a webmaster and say “I noticed your website as well as the excellent content you’ve there. Would you be “Open” to exchanging free info, so we gain additional leads for our buisness?”… Then let them ask you the questions, whatever you do, Don’t go into sales pitch mode, or they’ll just hang up.

3. Video Marketing – This one is possibly one of the most well-known methods of getting huge targeted traffic to your web site, building rapport in advance and creating a following. Should you can Google up “Top Video Hubs” and discover the top 20 say, you’ll be able to then begin creating “How To” videos for instance around your niche. Step-by-step videos for the way to do specific things which you offer professionally, will usually get followers and questions being asked, which is specifically what you want.

When it comes time to submit the videos, articles and aduios, you will discover there is description areas and bio boxes for the articles. Be as descriptive and persuasive as you can around solving a followers issues in this, but Don’t promote anything within the actual video, post or audio which is really a no, no. Be sure to include terms in your descriptions, titles and articles that people will look for in Google along with other search engines also.

Here’s a little trick when keyword optimizing your details, go into Google and sort in “Keyword Tool” and in the outcomes a free keyword tool by Google will display, this is your golden highway to being powerful. Obviously you will require to understand the way to use this efficiently and Google has some outstanding directions proper on their internet site and in their search engines should you look up videos on “how to make use of google keyword tool” you’ll get them for free.

The very best method to do keyword optimization is to group your keywords into categories for every section of your internet site. By way of example, when you have a dog web site, and sell kennels, you may have a whole section on kennels, and a word an individual might type in is “dog kennels” or far better yet “buy dog kennels” plus your town next to it. Then go ahead and develop many videos and information about each and every category, product or service you’re listing and you’ll attract a lot of extremely qualified visitors.

This is going to be quite a fair bit of work and a weekly time commitment will be needed if you are going to succeed, as there is no totally free rides in company. Unless you might have a “LOT” of funds to invest in leading article writers, you’re greater off beginning with this your self and performing much less, as opposed to outsourcing to a low-quality, low-cost team and ruining your reputation.

Free & Paid – What’s the Difference?

Well the free way means a whole lot of long handed work, doing it your self, submitting and finding post hubs to submit to manually… LOTS n LOTS of hard work… But successful none the less in the event you can’t afford small sums every month to invest inside your businesses marketing strategy on the web.

You are able to also use tools that allow you to write the write-up as soon as (you can also have the write-up written for you by utilizing outsourcers, just make sure they are extremely excellent at what they do), and then have multiple original versions created automatically, then distributed to 100′s of post hubs, related blogs, websites etc that match exactly your enterprise niche.

Why is this crucial to you? It’s crucial because you’ll need related links back to your web site from people who read your post all over the web, this both helps your rankings in Google as well as the likes, but much more importantly it puts you in touch with targeted prospects.

And another reason why backlinks are essential to your success is Google looks at them and defines their relevance to your web site. Once you use keywords people are searching for and make links out of them in your resource, bio box and description box with your information advertising and link them back, you’ll build a list of followers who know specifically what you are after, these are hot prospects and are the ones that are likely to buy from you.

So when it comes to distinguishing yourself from your competitors both on the web and offline, you will win hands down, as You’ve got the content already up there ready to point interested parties towards and this plays a big part in building trust.

Another little secret that you can use to win almost any niche online and give your local enterprise an instant boost, would be to lookup local keywords and optimize articles, videos and audios around them. So if we go back to our “Dog Collars”, you would look up words around “Buy Dog Collars New York” for example, and there’ll be several other phrases around your local area you are able to explore (and I suggest you take a excellent few days exploring this, as your thoroughness here, is going to be your key to winning locally).

If you then research the phrases further, so back to our example “Buy Dog Kennels New York” and type that into Google, and there’s under 300,000 results, KABOOM!… You’ve got every chance of finding on the front page over time for that phrase.

I sincerely hope this article helps you start out well, there’s a lot a lot more to understand, but this will at least get you started the Right way!