Everyone knows that when determining the value of a marketing initiative they must look at the bottom line or the return on investment (ROI) of the budget. Of course, at the end of the day, the ROI is all that really matters. After working with hundreds of clients, I’ve concluded that many marketing professionals overlook the performance indicators that lead up to the final conversion. Read the rest of this entry »
Why All The Negativity? A New SEO Approach
May 10th, 2012
Negative SEO attacks seem to be on the rise, are you protected?
The World of SEO has seen an increase of the use of an unethical SEO tactic called Negative SEO. While we at LocalDirective do not support this effort, it’s critically important you have an idea of what is this is, or are working with a firm who does, as you may one day be the target of a negative SEO attack.
Three Approaches to SEO
When it comes to overall SEO approaches, there are three general approaches:
- White Hat SEO – White Hat SEO is the practice of positive SEO tactics to influence the search engines to think highly of your site. This includes creating great content that draws traffic, is relevant to search terms being used, is coded to current standards, and has high quality backlinks (another webmaster’s way of “voting” for your site).
- Black Hat SEO – Black Hat SEO is the SEO practice that tries to “game the system” by finding the loop holes in the search algorithm and then exploiting those loop holes to artificially push sites higher. With this, a website’s focus is fully on what the search engines see, and not at all on the user experience; this generally has a negative impact on conversion. These black hat SEO tactics may gain very quick rankings in the search engines, but they usually don’t last long, and are becoming less and less effective in the short term. Google, and some of the other search engines, actually have a team of people who review sites that have been flagged for potential black hat and/or spammy activity. In the end, this may gain very short-term advances but risks getting sever negative consequences, up to and including being banned from the search engines.
- Negative SEO – The idea behind negative SEO is that you use the black-hat and known spammy SEO tactics against your competitors in order to drive them down in search results. If you do that to everyone who is ranking above you, eventually you’ll come out on top. The concept is that it’s easier to drive a site down than it is to naturally lift one up.
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Marketing In A Down Economy
April 26th, 2012The economy is stale, the unemployment rate is improving at a crawl and consumers have reduced discretionary spending. A lot of small businesses are hurting and scrambling for new customers as there seems to be fewer and fewer each day. Some of these businesses have reduce their marketing budgets to comply with the times, but reducing marketing only guarantees that less customers will be aware of your product or service.
An even bigger problem and less commonly thought about problem is the type of marketing that small businesses are investing in. In an effort to model the success of larger companies, small businesses are spending large amounts of their marketing dollars trying to brand their company. The problem is building a brand is very expensive and the benefits of branding are usually delayed. When branding you are positioning yourself in the marketplace and the minds of the marketplace so when they need your product or service they think of you. Branding can be a great long term strategy but most small businesses spend a dollar today and need that dollar back tomorrow to pay the bills.
The good news is there is a type of marketing that brings a more immediate response and while nothing can be guaranteed direct response marketing is measurable and scalable.
5 Tips To Improve The Keyword Quality Score In Your PPC Campaigns
April 19th, 2012Does Your Google Quality Score Really Matter?
Yes. In fact, Google rewards their clients for having a high Quality Score or QS. However, maybe more important, Google dings advertisers for low Quality Scores. Once you have a low Quality Score, it is a difficult and tedious process to climb out of that hole. Professional Online Marketing firms can help to minimize this risk by creating and managing your SEM Campaigns as well as developing content for your landing pages or website.
Your Quality Score is the measurement Google has assigned to determine how relevant your ads, keywords, and landing page are to a person who searches on keywords that trigger your ad to show. If Google concludes that your ad, keyword, and landing page are all relevant and useful to the person who is performing a search and viewing your ad, Google will assign a higher Quality Score to the specific keyword that is triggering those ads. On the other hand, Google will assign a lower Quality Score to keywords if they don’t view your ads, keywords, and landing page relevant and useful to the person performing a search.
Your Quality Score along with the amount you are willing to pay for a click are the primary numbers Google uses to determine the actual amount you will pay for each click. As your Quality Score increases, the amount you pay for each click decreases. You may be asking yourself, “How do I increase my Quality Score?”
Shopping Cart Abandonment – Ecommerce’s Biggest Challenge
April 12th, 2012
As an ecommerce business, you know just how much work goes into getting customers into your shopping cart…
- You need to optimize your website to bring quality organic traffic into your marketing funnel.
- You must have effective PPC campaigns that bring people who are looking for your product or services to your website.
- You must have a website designed that maximizes conversions so that people quickly find what they need.
Then you are home free, right? Maybe not. There’s still plenty that could go wrong that would cause you to lose a sale.
Here are a few tips to help you deal with an ecommerce business’s biggest challenge – the abandoned shopping cart.
Press Releases – Two Major Marketing Benefits for the Price of One
April 5th, 2012Most small-to-medium sized businesses don’t think much about press and publicity. They operate under the belief that it’s for larger businesses. The truth is that larger businesses would never have gotten where they are if they hadn’t had press and publicity when they were smaller.
The web has changed the rules and now you don’t have to be a Fortune 500 company to benefit from press and publicity. In fact, a few strategic steps can allow you to enjoy two major benefits from one well-crafted press release.
Unveiling of Google’s New Display Platform
March 22nd, 2012Why haven’t you been advertising on Google’s Display Network?
If you are like many other advertisers your answers are probably similar to ones such as…
- I don’t see the value.
- It’s not cost effective.
- It’s too difficult to truly target your audience.
- The system itself is too complicated.
If those reasons sound familiar to you, you may want to reconsider your decision not to advertise on the display network. Google has recently revamped the look, feel and functionality of their Display Network. These changes have definitely minimized (or even eliminated) many of the obstacles you may have previously experienced.
Google describes the renovation of their Display Network advertising as “a bit of a fairytale-like transformation”. The overhaul of the options now provided by Google include doing away with the overused conversion instruction of “Click Here!” banner ads, to new and improved banner or other display adds that are more modern and engaging which will result in more conversions for you.
The changes don’t stop with the look and feel of the ads themselves. To encompass these ads, Google has also been working on reinventing the Platform used to build and manage your newly created ads. Today is the unveiling of Google’s newly designed Display Network Platform that has promised to simplify the way you manage, bid and build your display campaigns. Read the rest of this entry »
More Than A Just Venice – The February 2012 Update To Google
March 15th, 2012Last week a large number of changes to the way Google ranks and displays search results was rolled out. Many Search Engine Optimization specialists have focused on one piece of the update, codenames “Venice”, and have not looked at the 39 other parts. When you categorize the list of updates you will start to see an interesting trend. Many of the other parts of this update actually dovetail with the Venice update, making it even easier for small websites to compete than many SEOs realize.
Read the rest of this entry »
Is Facebook Putting You Out Of Business?
March 6th, 2012There is a common fear among business owners and executives about their business failing. While cash flow, business model, and ineffective business practices will cause the business to fail, external factors can play a role as well.
While Facebook has never been looked at as something that will make a business truly succeed or fail on its own, the potential for a company to appear like they are out of business is eminently on the horizon. How?
Are You Going Out of Business: Secrets Your Competition Don’t Want You To Know About The Mandatory Facebook Timeline Change
March 30th Deadline For Facebook Timeline
Last Wednesday, Facebook held the first ever fMC (Facebook Marketing Conference). At this conference there were several changes and new products that were introduced, or rolled out just before this conference.
While there are several new marketing options, which open up a whole new model for marketing on the social platform, the one you must pay attention to NOW is the conversion to Timeline.
