Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing

If you have come across internet marketing before then you will no doubt have heard many people talking about search engine optimization, or SEO, but what exactly does this mean and how can it work for you? Essentially it is a way of being aware of what your potential customers look for online and the way in which they search for similar companies. It is important to understand that SEO is crucial if you want to make a success of your online marketing and make your business profitable.

How to Get Started

Firstly you will need to make sure that you have a website in place for your business and that it looks good and functions well. SEO is a way in which you will set up the internal structure of your website so that it can be easily found in the search engines and by those who want what it is you offer.

This may sound complicated but it need not be. It is important that you pay attention to the keywords and phrases that you use within your site and search marketing as it is by using these that the search engines will rank your website. By ranking as high as possible you have a much better chance of being found since people tend to only click on the first few results that come up when they search. If you aren't sure then contacting a good B2B Marketing Agency should help you.

It is also vital to be sure that the content that you place on your site is interesting, informative and above all of high quality. This is because anything that looks or sounds unprofessional or is not interesting to read will put people off investigating your site further and returning.

Targeting Your Niche Market

When you are thinking about SEO as part of your internet marketing you need to always keep in mind your niche market and who exactly you are targeting. This is important as obviously you wish to attract the people that want your services or products to come and visit you and they will find you much quicker if you know the kind of words and phrases they will search with.

In this way your internet marketing should really take off and you should notice a marked improvement in the number of visitors to your website.

What to Look for in a Business Consultant

Setting up and running a business can be a difficult task, especially if you are unsure of what you are doing. Hiring a business consultant can be a great way to ensure that everything runs smoothly and your business is as successful as it can be.

If you are thinking of setting up a new business but have little experience in this area then hiring a business consultant could be a great way to get help and guidance. They can provide you with invaluable expertise with the aim of helping your business to become as successful as possible. Even if your business is a little more established you could still find that a business consultant is incredibly useful, especially if you are expanding or going through a transition period.

Finding a Business Consultant


Choosing the right business consultant for you needs careful consideration as you are placing some of the success of your business in their hands. For this reason be sure to ask plenty of questions, check examples of past work and see if you can talk to past or present clients to see if they come recommended. Check to see if they have delivered the work on time and that it has been of a high quality. Their reputation as well as their work ethics and ability to deliver what the task has required of them is a crucial factor. It is also important that when choosing a business consultant you find someone that you feel has an interest in your business and that you can relate to on a more personal level.

Working with your Business Consultant

Once you have found a business consultant that you think is suitable it is important that you determine the scope of the work you have and discuss a time frame for this to be completed. It is important that you select someone who can be flexible in accommodating your needs.

Hiring a business consultant allows you to stay up to date with the some of the newest marketing techniques around and will hopefully keep you one step ahead of the competition. Without one you would need to spend a lot of time and effort researching and carrying out your own marketing which is not just time consuming but could work out more costly in the long run. Above all, make sure that the business consultant you select is dedicated to your business to ensure its success in the long run.

Why you Should Consider Hiring a Marketing Expert

Running a successful marketing campaign is vital to attract new customers and increase your profits; however it can sometimes be a little confusing. Hiring a marketing expert can be a great way of ensuring that your advertising runs smoothly.

Marketing and advertising your business is absolutely vital if you want to generate sales and therefore make your business as successful as possible. If you are new to this area then you may find that hiring a marketing expert is a great way to ensure you are making the most of your advertising. No matter if you are a large or small business you can always benefit from the help of a marketing expert to keep you ahead of your competitors and gain plenty of traffic to your website.

How can they Help?

Search marketing companies will use a variety of search engine marketing tools as well as articles with plenty of relevant keywords and link building campaigns in order to generate as much traffic as possible for your business. They should also be able to look after the on page factors to make sure that your website responds well to all marketing efforts. Ways in which a marketing expert might do this include making sure that the content on the site is keyword specific and creating product tags, titles, relevant content and headers based around certain keywords to help build up your customer base..

By hiring a marketing expert and someone with experience in search engines they can help you to generate and build high quality back links for your business. This is especially important if you do not understand or have the time for search engine optimisation as this can form a key part of your advertising campaign. By approaching a marketing expert you can carefully select and target a niche area for your business to increase your ranking in online search engines.

An online marketing expert will also understand the many different advertising techniques that are available to you and be able to guide you as to which ones are most suitable. For instance creating and running a blog can be a great way to increase the traffic to your website and by updating it regularly and using unique, informative keyword rich content it can really boost your sales!

How Your Business Can Succeed With Email Marketing

In 2009 the US Direct Marketing Association (DMA) produced a report: ‘The Power of Direct’, which revealed that every $1 invested in email marketing produced a return of $43.08.

Additionally, Forrester Research, an independent IT and business research company, estimates that the Euro
pean email marketing sector will be worth around £2.15 billion by 2012.
Email marketing is far more than a cheap and easy alternative to direct mail. The fact is, anyone can do email marketing – but not everyone can do it well.

Here are 4 proven ways for creating better email campaigns:

Devise a Secure System for Collecting Email Addresses
Every time your business connects with a customer you should seek to capture their email address. You can do this through your website, via a call centre, surveys, exhibitions, point-of-sale, prize draws and so on.
There are strict rules regarding the keeping of personal data and how you use it. The Direct Marketing Association Email Marketing Council produces Best Practice Guidelines that will prevent you falling foul of the regulations. More information is available at: www.dma.org.uk.

Do make it easy for your prospects to opt-in or opt-out of your mailings. People who sign up to receive your emails/ newsletters/ offers need to be reassured they can unsubscribe easily, with one click of the mouse preferably.

Create an Attention-grabbing Subject Line


Internet marketing is all about satisfying your readers’ short attention span. Also bear in mind that some email service providers will display only the first 38-47 characters of your subject line in a recipient’s inbox – and for mobile devices the subject line is shorter still.
Therefore keep your subject lines short and to the point – and test them repeatedly. It’s often helpful to devise your subject line last – after you have finalised your message.

Keep Your Message Content Relevant

‘Irrelevancy’ has been dubbed the new spam, so make sure what you write is both relevant and engaging for your readers. Try not to think of it as blasting out an email to an entire database, try to picture one single customer that encapsulates your target market and write just for him or her. Personalise your communications as much as possible. For greater impact make sure each email focuses on one single message rather than several.

Sending Emails at the Right Time Can make a Huge Difference to Your Response Levels
A UK market research team analysed over 650,000 emails sent by some 34 companies. The results might surprise you.
Here’s what they discovered about the best and worst times to deliver your emails:
• 10pm to 9am – the worst time to send email (the email equivalent of the ‘black hole’).
• 9am-10am – the second best time for email opening, consumers are happy to be distracted by special offers, live events, and deals on consumer goods.
• 10am-noon – your prospects are focussing on work-related matters rather than opening marketing emails.
• Noon-2pm – somewhat surprisingly, the survey found consumers prefer to spend their lunch break checking out news alerts and online magazines rather than catching up on emails.
• 2pm-3pm – the immediate post-lunch period – again with the main focus on work, the only emails that elicited a response were those relating to financial services.
• 3pm-5pm –workers begin winding down, with more of a focus on their personal situation. Another positive time to send emails relating to property and finance.
• 5pm-7pm – a great time for recipients to receive offers about holidays and B2B promotions.
• 7pm-10pm – the best time to engage your customer: all sorts of communications fair well in this time slot, particularly offers on clothing and special interests. Gym, sports and leisure promotions are exceptionally well received during this period.

How to Improve Your Google Ranking . . . Strategies for Achieving Website Success

You type your business’s name into Google’s search engine and hey presto it appears on your results screen . . . on page 12.

Ouch.

In the mind of your potential customers that might as well be somewhere in outer space because you’re definitely off their radar.
So what can you do about it?

It’s time to consider employing a Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) strategy.

Search Engine Optimisation might sound technical – the sort of thing only a web developer should be interested in – but in fact it’s based on a simple concept and use of a search engine company such as the Leicester SEO company could be beneficial or using a web marketing company.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN put the most relevant choices per search at the top of their results page, so their users don’t waste time weeding through thousands of entries to find what they’re looking for.

The search engine companies use bots (robots) or spiders to crawl the Internet examining the context of pages and the quality of their content and rank them accordingly.

For sound SEO, keywords are vital. A keyword is simply a word or term someone might type into the search box in order to find your website, or a single page from it. Have a brainstorming session: write down all the possible terms potential customers might use to find your business. You can test your findings using Google’s AdWords keyword tool.

AdWords reveals how popular your search terms are by listing the number of local and global searches during the past month. It will also offer you some alternatives similar to those you have come up with.

Keep the search engine ‘bots’ in mind, but write for humans!
Ever come across a web page or online article that has been stuffed with a particular keyword to the extent it makes you cringe at every sentence, because the word or phrase in question has been so over-used?

It used to be that unscrupulous web developers could saturate their sites with keywords and fool the bots into giving them a higher ranking. Only now the bots have got savvy and refuse to take the bait!

So build your website for your human visitors (not for bots) and make it as engaging and user-friendly as possible. Remember, ultimately it’s the quality of your content that will determine your website’s ranking.

Another thing to bear in mind is that ‘spiders’ are unable to see Flash-based content, JavaScript content and other so-called ‘rich media’, techie people seem to love.

SEO Copy is the Spice of Internet Life

In these digital times, it's all about the internet – plain and simple. Get your online offering really in gear and you'll reap the benefits when it comes to increasing traffic taking notice of your product or service.

With readable and exciting copy on your website, that also contains the relevant SEO, trending keywords – your 'authority' rating within the Google/search engine stratosphere will quickly begin to grow.

But, before you go any further it's a good idea to compare your business model to the following key points to see if you can really benefit from organic SEO:

1. Think about what your product, service or industry is and research as to whether users/customers actually use a search engine to look for it.
2. Consider the appeal of your website. Customers will be drawn to a well designed site that has good functionality and champions the virtues of the brand.
3. It is a competitive market out there. Double-check that the pricing of your product or service compares favourably with competitors.
4. In terms of a customers’ search engine input, is your site brought to their attention via the relevant phrases and keywords?

Right, so now you've decided SEO is definitely for you we can highlight a few sure-fire tips that will have your online presence really begin to pay dividends. It may take a fair amount of hard work and time but ultimately, organic SEO will prove more self-fulfilling long term than the immediacy of paying for your Google/search engine ranking.

Appeasing the almighty god that is the ranking algorithm, as hinted upon earlier, starts with the quality and regular updating of your content – add sound link building into the equation for good measure too. So ensure you have professionally written and, just as importantly, unique copy with your carefully selected primary keywords and key phrases from Google Adwords. Search engines find it impossible to resist tantalising, natural and fresh content.

Another good trick to consider is to make sure whenever you refer to yourself on your site, you always include your location as often as you can. For example, when you mention your head quarters use "London based office" or "our London store/office". This means you will begin to snare local searches of your product or service.

Of course, this is just the tip of the SEO iceberg and just the beginning of internet marketing – search online for a good SEO consultancy and see what else they can do for you and your business to climb those search engine rankings.

How to Find More Customers and Increase Your Online Business

If your business has an Internet presence (and let’s face it, for most businesses it’s an essential requirement these days), you should constantly be on the lookout for new and innovative ways to increase your customer base.

Here are some simple ideas for winning new customers:

Discover Your Target Customers’ Other Interests:

If you are selling health-related products, for example, you probably already market via health forums, health blogs and other places where ‘health’ is the main topic of conversation. This is all well and good, but remember this is where your competitors will be concentrating their main marketing efforts too. So this time ask yourself: “What might my ideal customers’ other interests be?”

Although your customers are interested in staying healthy, they could also be avid sports fans, or movie buffs, or pet lovers, or DIY enthusiasts, so it’s worth casting your net further afield so that other potential customers get to hear about you and your products or services. Bear in mind also that people with the same interests tend to group together, whether that’s in the real world or the virtual one!

Vary Your Offering:

You know you provide a great product or service, but getting more people to try it can be a challenge, even for larger companies. Every now and then, a ‘household name’ will change the look of a product’s packaging (even though the product itself hasn’t changed) to appeal to a wider audience, or a different market sector. You could do the same.

If you are selling an ebook, you could turn it into a downloadable podcast for those who would rather listen to the spoken word than read your content. Again if you use video as a marketing tool, you could enable your site visitors to upload it to their MP3s so they can listen to it anywhere they want. By providing these additional options, people can choose how they connect with you.

Offer Free Stuff

Whilst you might not be ready to launch your own Freemium (free premium magazine) as seen on a recent episode of The Apprentice! giving away free content is a time-proven marketing tool for pulling in more customers.

If used correctly, this strategy may be all you need to get people to pick up that phone
and call you, or subscribe to your online newsletter.

If you are an estate agent, you could create a free report about "How to get more value from your home sale."

By creating content around a specific title like in the above example, you will primarily attract people who are considering selling their property. In building a rapport with your target audience, while establishing yourself as an expert in your field, who do you think your followers are going to ask to market their home for them?

Other freebies you could offer depending on the nature of your business:

 Free shipping
 Free sample of your products
 Free trials
 Free estimates
 Free DVD tutorials
 Free personalised stuff (with your company name on, naturally).


Use Social Networking to Attract More Customers:

There’s nothing more tedious than companies banging on about themselves and their achievements all the time. Savvy social networkers on the other hand provide entertainment without the hard sell. Innocent smoothies, with their amusing anecdotes and off-the-wall humour, are a prime example of how to do social networking right.

Think about how powerful these social networks are in spreading news and information. So be the source that influences other people. How do you do it? Look for the "in thing" or the "hottest trends" that could interest your potential customers and share it with them. Use Google Reader to glean this information.

Website

Most importantly you should have a website which matches or over delivers your potential customer's expectations. Using a professional Lutterworth Website Design team could help you to increase your web presence and sales.