It’s fascinating that even after all these years involved with search engine and internet marketing, there are still those who believe that being in the top 10 results on a search engine is the only result that matters when promoting a business online. And, more interestingly, that many company executives believe that typing in the company name (or, worse, the URL) into the search engine and ranking number one, proves that the budget spent on internet marketing is justified.
Let us consider the problems with the above misunderstanding, particularly for SMEs.
Firstly, if the only budget you are spending to market your business online is on search engine optimisation, you are missing a huge audience. Whilst many companies may not feel that there is the necessary time and resource to handle multiple social media accounts, this is a) where agencies come in and b) a misunderstanding of how social media operates – you do not need a vast social media presence to benefit.
Obviously, the search engines are a logical and essential place for you to have an online presence. However, it is vital to understand how people use the search engines before making the (wrong) assumption that all searchers looking for your company, products and services will type in your company name. Or your URL. If a potential customer knows your URL, and are a savvy Internet user, they are just as likely to type this directly into the location browser of the browser and bypass the search engines entirely.
What is far more likely is that the person looking for your products does not actually know you exist as a company, is unaware of your URL or company name, and therefore will only find your website if it is optimised for the specific terms being searched upon.
If you sell a product, particularly one that is in a competitive market, there is a strong possibility that your website visitors and sales come from word of mouth recommendations from the potential buyer’s social network, from comparison sites, or from links and reviews on other, well-trafficked websites.
Returning to the search engine optimisation issue, many websites do not actually rank for the terms that the average searcher is likely to use to find your product. Many websites are built by website designers, rather than by designers with search engine optimists’ assistance. Whilst Management may love the look of your website, if it does not work for either the search engines or your potential visitors, it will not work for you either.
Therefore, it is important to check that your site includes the terms most likely to be searched for, that these terms occur in all the places required by the search engines, and that the site is competitively optimised in order to rank above others selling similar products.
If the last is not feasible because you are a small fish in a big pond, then it is even more imperative that you use many of the other tools in the internet marketing toolbox to attract attention. eg social media.
To see how well your website is doing on Google, type your main product into the search box and check your ranking. Check your analytics to see how many visitors you are getting from the terms you had expected to be those bringing in most traffic. Think long and hard about where else you are marketing and whether it is driving the necessary traffic to your website. Perhaps 2012 may be the time for a change of tactics?
Google has launched real-time analytics within Google Webmaster Tools and this now presents some great opportunities for co-ordinated marketing campaigns across a multitude of media with real-time tracking of results.
What this means is that there is no more lengthy waiting to judge whether or not a campaign is working. By putting up a blog post with an associated tweet (or series thereof), including tracking devices, you can judge instantaneously when interest picks up, where the peaks are, and when the long tail begins. This offers the chance to reinvigorate a campaign by re-engagement or to pull it if it is of little effect or is generating negative feedback.
You can trial a multitude of different messages to see which proves most effective. You can offer alternate landing pages to judge results from a variety of landing pages to find the most effective for lead generation and sales for your target audience and product set.
Until now, it has been hard work to keep tabs on a campaign throughout its lifetime, particularly when that is extremely short, as is often found with social media campaigns where attention spans are short. These real time results put Google ahead of most of the other free analytics services, and by building them into an environment which most webmasters and search marketing practioners are comfortable with means that adoption will be high.
Can you afford not to make the most of the real time analytics? The reality is that for many website owners, tracking marketing campaigns can be a time-consuming and arduous task, but now the results are available as soon as a campaign begins, there should be little excuse for not checking, monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing spend.
It really is as simple as including a tracker so that you can watch as a campaign begins to take effect, evaluate where the traffic is being driven from, and make a decision about what to do as that traffic falls away. However, on a more advanced level, the real time analytics will undoubtedly prove worth their weight in gold to search and social media marketing companies who depend on this level of statistics to position effective campaigns for clients, over and over again.
Google’s free Webmaster Tools now provides information on +1 recommendations to help put more of a user value on results.
Google introduced +1 to search results to give users a chance to rate content on websites – similar to ‘liking’ pages.
It gives a valuable insight not just into how many people have visited a webpage – but how many people would consider it good enough to recommend.
The update to Webmaster Tools this week will offer a vastly larger amount of data for internet marketing.
It’s now possible to review how many +1s your pages are attracting, how they are affecting your ranking and traffic, who is +1ing your site, and where they live.
It means you can see which pages work, which don’t, and refocus your strategy to capitalise on your popular content.
Google’s Analytics tool, which can be used in combination with Webmaster Tools, is now also reporting on social media trends too – allowing webmasters to see which content is being picked up and shared by users, and adding more useful data to show how people are interacting with your site.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.
Webmasters and online marketers wishing to effectively evaluate the success of online marketing services rely on two key tools, Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools.
Now those programs will be combined as part of a new pilot.
The new Google Analytics service aims to offer a much-improved tool for tracking online activity.
Previously, Google Analytics let webmasters see data showing what visitors do after arriving on a website, such as which links they click or pages they view, while Webmaster Tools showed how visitors reached the site in the first place.
Webmasters, businesses and online marketers had to use both programs separately, even though both were made by Google. Many told the company they would like to see the services combined.
Now Google has put the features of both programs into one product, as part of a limited pilot.
The revamped Analytics program will allow users to view clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average ranking alongside visualisations of the data.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.
Now, it is far easier to see the breakdown of the routes or paths that your customers take to achieve a goal or conversion on your website.
Google has added multi-funnel analytics to the mix, permitting you to track exactly which paths to conversions are proving most effective and lucrative for your business.
So, if you want to know whether a specific campaign using banner ads, social media, offline advertising, PPC or certain search keywords is proving the most effective at generating sales, or achieving other goals of interest, you can now see all the interaction points that are triggering your conversions.
For more info, watch Google’s handy little video….or ask your internet marketing agency to set up funnels to allow intensive action tracking for maximum conversion optimisation.
Now you can make the most of teamwork by allowing every member of your company who has access to Google Analytics to annotate the graphs about your traffic and highlight, for instance, why specific peaks and troughs have occurred in your website traffic.
Whilst it is possible to do this with static graphs taken from analytics already, eg in a Powerpoint presentation to a client or management, now Google have added the chance to annotate graphs to show why certain highs and lows occurred in your traffic.
Having this information available, rather than lost on a team member’s hard drive from research they were conducting, can only be ‘a good thing’.
We predict: 2010 will be the year of analytics analysis. It will be the year when people finally begin to nail down what works for their company and website, and what doesn’t, through hard-nosed maths, facts and evidence instead of guesswork or following the sheep.
Monday morning, 1st day of the month, and a small task for you.
This is about an integral part of marketing your company – networking and being interactive.
Put your business name/brand name/own name into Twitter search and see what comes up. If nothing comes up, then you are missing a trick and should have a quick word with yourself about why you have overlooked such an important internet marketing tool!
Take a moment to check out what people are saying about you and your company. Look at the links you are getting – any of value to follow up today or this week? Websites you could be linking to, or even considering joint ventures and partnerships with? People you should be following? Any comments you should respond to – positive or negative? Any interesting content you could share with your customers and website visitors?
Then start doing a weekly check on your analytics and see where twitter and other social media tools show up on your referrals. You may be very surprised!
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