Online marketing news and resources.

Because Google only updates its Toolbar PageRank once every 2 to 3 months, what you are seeing today may be quite different from what the actual PageRank is!

We all know that the more links you have pointing to your website, the higher your PageRank will be. Link building is the very foundation of online marketing, and the reason for the existence of SEO and the PPC system. Your site’s life is given relevance based on ‘quantity’ as the number of links you have pointing to your site and ‘quality’ as the PageRank of those links. (more…)

There is one sure method to show regular visitors, customers and competitors alike, that your online marketing strategies have been a success – update your entire site!

It’s bound to cause to a stir! Especially if you add some of the latest fast-trend, super widgets currently wowing the web community and your visitors will be well impressed – in fact you will need to organise serious email marketing to get them to check your wizzy new site out! To be seen as a company doing well, bucking the economic downturn, has to be a winning strategy!

Some businesses had of course, decided to ‘sit it out’ until the worst of the recession was over. That time may be said to be just about here and now may be the perfect time to give your online marketing presence an update. It may even be, that some of your competitors are starting to look a little outdated themselves , so its the perfect opportunity to fly past them, gain an edge and absorb their market share with a fresh new look!

The immediate effect of a website refresh will be to generate additional interest and attract renewed traffic, especially from those visitors who have stopped routinely coming to check you out because the original website design may have started looking a little tired and perhaps lost its original appeal.

It will also enable you to re-focus your website to better suit latest visitor behaviour and customer requirements as shown by monitoring analytics and user tracking.
Your aim is to improve your business by adding new products or services. Most importantly, install dynamic content and interactive user applications such as newsfeeds, SEO blogs, backlink articles, offers, discounts and newsletter signups to generate valuable traffic.

Take the opportunity to completely re-optimise with fresh SEO keyword content to kickstart static search engine indexing and page ranking. Relook at all your site text and ask your website design agency to advise on online written content and how it can be improved. Keeping content fresh daily keeps search engines happy – and potential customers coming!

The key is to come right up to date and present an entirely new online presence to engage with your audience via social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook. Having tied up outstanding loose ends, your site relaunch will revitalise your online presence and drive business growth forward into the next phase.

The wary site visitor is looking to have his confidence in what you have to say confirmed by the way that you say it!

In Part ONE, we touched upon how the basic look of web design and site layout will affect the instinctive behaviour of a visitor, which determines whether they will click through, or be encouraged to stay and interact further. All your marketing strategies will be useless if your actual site does not work in the first place, let alone perform efficiently.

It has to be remembered that everyone is very aware just how infested the internet now is with a worldwide criminal community armed with highly sophisticated methods to steal both your money and identity via bogus websites. Most visitors will be looking for the slightest hint of a fraud being attempted. If nothing else, your site must convince that your business is real and genuine and will do exactly what it says on the tin!

Lets look at some more ways you can convince your visitor to stay and do business with you :

Writing online content – This should be left to the web professionals. Not only will they correctly optimise for SEO keyword phrases, they will pitch the tone just right to your niche target audience. Both Google search engines and potential customers will not ‘rate’ you highly or at all, if word choice, spelling, grammar and readability have been obviously neglected. This alone, speaks volumes and arouses suspicions about the site origins. Short, concise, easy-to-read and well-written copy, which is jargon-free, tells the visitor that care has been taken to speak directly to them. And NO, a spell-checker is not enough!

Checkout Security – Be prepared to go the PayPal route. Online buyers are becoming more and more savvy – no encryption, no sale! Your site should make it easy to shop with a shopping cart that can be changed with a click, a fast secure checkout and an Invoice in the e-mail box (with a confirmation number). Do this and you’re building a base of buyers who’ll be back because you had the goods and you made it easy, convenient and fun.

Establish an Interactive Relationship – If possible, give your users something for free! In fact, it is now the accepted norm! Site visitors expect to be an ‘active’ participant and find out first all about what they are looking for before considering making a purchase. They are more likely to buy from you if you give them the ALL the advance information and data they want! They expect to open up larger product images, read data spec, clink onto links, video, and download all relevant info easily and quickly.

Opt-Ins – A ‘Call To Action’ that is not seen as a ‘hard sell’. Subscription ‘Opt in’ provides potential buyers with the opportunity to receive a monthly newsletter containing exclusive offers and insider info. It helps to remind visitors’ of your site, and encourages return visits to check out your latest products and prices as part of their regular online routine.

Remember – keep ‘em interested and they’ll keep coming back to buy!

Thousands of site hits .. Positive visitor feedback .. Awesome Stats? But – NO SALES! If that sounds a bit like your situation, maybe you haven’t yet worked out what the problems are and how to fix them!

It’s simple, we all know it…so why do these problems persist with some business websites ? It may be they do know but won’t do anything about it because they’re afraid of what they imagine the cost might be! But more importantly – there are always TWO golden rules that must be observed if you want to succeed online – and we all know what they are:

(i) Attract and drive potential customer traffic. (ii) Hold and convert visitors to sales customers.

Without sales conversion, your website is worthless, your online marketing a waste of time, and your business won’t survive!

We all know this so let’s look at some of the first areas for improvement:

Website design – Dependent completely on knowing your target audience – your visitors – potential customers! What are you selling, who are you selling to, are you really giving them what they want and are you presenting it the way they want it? Every detail counts from the look, tone, understanding, openness, transparency, simplicity, ease of use, calls to action ….these will encourage confidence to get the desired result!

Written Content - This involves several considerations: font style, font size and text/background colours. Choose an easy to read font . Fresh content should be uploaded almost daily. It should be optimised for SEO keyword phrases and the actual subject matter should be short, to the point, instantly readable and interesting! Finally, the combination of font colour and background colour is critical. Dark lettering on plain, light backgrounds – or the reverse – is considered best practice.

Site Structure & Layout – Keep your homepage simple and inviting. Visitors do not want to be confronted with sensory overload! Cut acres of text and remove graphic image clutter! Remember to maintain same page style and layout throughout. Use large, well-labelled links for ease of use. Forget the ‘company vision’– no-one’s interested. Keep it simple, understated, well labelled and organised – and visitors will be more inclined to stick around, browse and, ultimately, buy !

Site map – This is a useful tool, especially if you’ve got multiple links off the homepage, followed by assorted drill-down screens before users find the products they’re looking for. A site map is basically a plot of the site, with direct links to specific features.

Remember the key website rules – Eye-catching, convenient, uncluttered, easy-to navigate, easy-to-read, interesting!

Part TWO – coming up soon – keep checking the Provoke Design blog !

Social Media is everywhere! It’s rapid adoption right across social and business life is a clear indication that traditional communications channels leave something to be desired.

From ‘talking at’ consumers, the emergence of Social Media has altered the balance of power, and now consumers have a significant say about company brands and the way goods and services are accessed and purchased.

Consumers are voting with their mouse! One click is all it takes to say whether you are getting it right or urgently need to talk with your website design company! An experienced and professional agency should be able to analyse, advise and build relevant, targeted results-driven online marketing strategies. (more…)

Many companies do both but some SMEs may only have a limited marketing campaign budget, then it can be a straight choice – so you need to know what’s going to work best for your business.

You have to attract and drive word search visitors to your website! This much you know. But you can’t afford to do everything all at once and you’ve heard or know that PPC campaigns can get great results – at a price! You think that SEO may be relatively inexpensive, and you could be right.

The reality is, for your online marketing campaign to succeed and get desired results – your SEO website design agency will emphatically analyse and report back what your business is telling you what really need to do – and you will have to accept the truth of what it’s telling you!

On a straight comparison of what could be right for you, you should focus on the following :

Cost - SEO is relatively inexpensive. However, you will need to engage the services of experienced and expert SEO professionals who know what they’re doing, will save you time and will get you the results quicker than if you attempt to cut corners and attempt SEO yourself. Your time is better spent running your business!

Speed - if you are looking to generate traffic quickly, can afford an advertising budget, then it’s PPC everytime! This is particularly crucial if you have a new website because it takes a new site between THREE to SIX MONTHS or more for search engine optimisation to take effect for you to see significant traffic.

However, a long term ‘organic’- or natural – traffic building strategy is always your best method as search engine algorithms are more likely to repeat visit and index your site higher on their page rankings according to frequency of relevant, genuine activity and fresh ‘quality’ keyword content.

Competition - PPC is probably less competitive than SEO. There are some exceptions, but it’s fair to say that it’s usually easier to get your keywords to the top position with PPC than using SEO techniques.

Ongoing Maintenance – PPC requires daily attention to maintain your keyword top spot compared to SEO. At the outset, SEO requires a lot of demanding and detailed work to kickstart link traffic but once achieving high organic listings, it doesn’t require the same level of constant attention.

Email is on the rise once more! Viewed in recent years as looking a rather tired and plodding shire horse, when compared to the frisky colts of iphone, Facebook and Twitter, recent surveys indicate that deliverability is not getting worse and email marketing spends are set to rise.

Most businesses know too well the perceived challenges of email as a medium for leading marketing strategies. But in fact, the overall volume of spam has ebbed and flowed over the past 12 months, due inasmuch, to the ability of ISP software developed to recognise the difference between a legitimate brand’s customer emails and spam.

With the announcement of the imminent launch of GoogleWave, which brings emailing into the instant ‘live’ messaging, interactive age, we can expect a more urgent role being played out in two way online marketing and customer communications. This might dispose of the misinterpretation of the youth market presuming that ‘email is for old people’!

A 2008 Channel Preference Survey reported that nearly three quarters questioned, prefer permission-based promotional messages to come through email.

Significantly, whilst it’s true that teens and young adults are more likely to text family and friends than send email, this does not mean that they have the same preferences when communicating with companies. Instead of the emerging social network channels, 32% of 15 to 17 years old want permission-based offers delivered through direct mail – 8% more than the 35 to 54 age group.

Accurately assessing the effectiveness of the role email plays in brand identity communication and awareness campaigns is dependent on following a recognised set of actions:

• Use the requested opt-in names to guarantee high deliverability rate.
• Offer consumers a choice of contacting them – Email isn’t always the preferred method!
• Use ‘report-as-spam’ buttons and ‘sender authentication’ software- legitimizes your email marketing.
• Sign up with ISP whitelists and complaint feedback loops
• Always quickly remove bounces and addresses of those who request removal.
• Constantly check metrics and email tools to monitor consumer behaviour.

By following the basics of permission marketing and understanding the importance of maintaining email reputation will produce near 100 percent successful deliverability rates.

Latest surveys show Social Media is driving up the UK’s daily web-browse fix to an astonishing 30 hours a week!

As we move into the second decade of the 21st century, it’s the online culture of the blogosphere, Tweetdeck and Facebook where human beings are migrating to habitually work, rest and play.

If you are a business planning your next online marketing campaign, it is useful to know that the results of the study show that, daily, we now spend five hours online and 3 hours at the weekend. (more…)

Catching customer attention in places most likely to buy your products needs careful keyword checking otherwise you could be offering ice cubes to Eskimos!

Location targeting allows you to set geographical limitations by selecting specific campaign settings. This means that if your business is like, e.g. Provoke, website design, Manchester, and you are looking to serve both national and local geographical catchment areas, you can carefully target potential customers in particular locations, say, in Cheshire or the North West.

At the outset of your online marketing campaign, you will need to remember that there are two ways location targeting can be set to work.

Your campaign advertising can be seen by:

• Anyone that Google decides is within your targeted locations – using IP addressing which is not always that accurate.
• Anyone, anywhere who uses one of your keywords combined with a geographic place word – e.g. a town name.

When compiling your SEO keyword phrases, the first obvious detail to pay attention to is the fact, there are towns and cities located both within the UK and the USA that share the same name!

Example : A campaign that has location targeting set to places like, say, Manchester, Washington, Boston, Halifax, Salisbury, Norfolk, or London will need to be individually described for those who search and are using one of your included ‘place name’ keyword phrases.

It is important to remember that location targeting isn’t that accurate at determining exactly where in the world the word searcher is! Google decides their location based on the IP address that the searcher is using – and your IP address may be not accurately reflect where you really are, especially if you live near a large city.

However, location targeting can increase your chances of success if you try the following method:

Set up two campaigns :

• The first uses Google’s location targeting – specifically set to the area you are chasing (e.g. Manchester).
• The second uses a much broader location (e.g. Cheshire). However in this second campaign you use keywords that include the town names you are specifically interested in.

The likelihood is that you will probably see much lower impressions for the second campaign but the conversion rates will be significantly better. Location targeting is an useful method but, as in all keyword campaigns, you will have to keep testing and trying out your phrases to see what works best for your business in each location.

Email marketing will be changed forever as Google begins testing its new communication tool, Google Wave.

Due for full consumer launch early next year, Google has just begun beta-trialling with 100,000 invitees, to help test its new social editing tool, Google Wave, which will combine email, instant messaging and wiki-style live editing! (more…)