Cleveland, Northeast Ohio & Lake County, Ohio SEO/SEM/PPC

Five Great Tips to Conversion Path Success

pitchblende — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:01:34 +0000

Conversion Path Optimization is the next new catch phrase that is hitting the online marketing area of the internet. Search Engine Optimization and Landing Page Optimization are still popular but if you ask around where most companies are putting their money, they will say trying to improve their Conversion Path. Here are a few tips that will help you improve your conversion path.

1. Collect only the necessary information to complete the goal. While collecting information such as where a customer heard about you may be useful, a lot of times it will slow down the conversion and may increase the abandonment rate. If information is useful to you but not essential request that information after the conversion has taken place. It may even help with buyer’s remorse if a customer feels you are interested in their opinion.

2. K.I.S.S. - Keep it Simple Stupid. Do not make the conversion path too complicated nor create to many paths. This will only confuse your customers. Follow best practices when creating your conversion path. Mark clear call to actions and align content closely together.

3. Make your conversion path in a similar design to your webpage. Having a conversion path that has a different layout or design than your main website will increase customer abandonment because it will have an unfamiliar look and feel.

4. Include descriptive content to help answer questions along the way. Often customers leave the funnel to look for more information. Include common information and content in your funnel to answer their questions but keep them on the conversion path.

5. Test regularly. Like all online marketing campaigns, testing is the most important thing you can do to improve conversions. Testing headlines, images, call to actions, and content can greatly increase your conversion rate. Simple changes like “Instant Quotes” instead of “Free Quotes can help achieve a 50% improvement.

Hopefully these tips will make an improvement in your conversion path. The most important is definitely #5 but all will help in some way. There are several other tips. Feel free to contact me if you want to help build our your conversion path optimization strategy.

Great SEO Tools

pitchblende — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 16:39:47 +0000

I’m always asked which are some of the best SEO tools and honestly there are so many other there that it’s hard to decide which ones are great, which ones are good and which ones are useless. There are many out there that are useless or only slightly beneficial. I’ll write about the major tools that I use and let you decide for yourself if you use them. I’ll categorize these seo tools in a few sections.

Page Information - Want to know a bit more about the page?
SEO Plugin for Firefox - With this tool you can check out the page rank, anchorlinks and other important information? This is a very important tool and it doesn’t require you to visit a bunch of websites for the information.
Website Grader Tool - This tool is great to see the basics of a certain website and critizes it based on basic SEO information. A good tool for beginners.
Duplicate Content Checker - Duplicate Content can be a serious problem for SEO. Search Engines know when content is not original and they lower a ranking for that particular page.
Alexa Rank Comparison - Alexa, owned by Amazon, is a popular traffic estimator. This tool is useful to see traffic estimates between two websites.
Code-to-Text Ratio Tool - The more text on a website the more likely you’ll have targeted content. Google and other search engines rank pages on relevancy.

Keyword Tools - What to know more about specific keywords?
Google Keyword Tool - The most basic tool for Keyword research, Google’s tool is simple yet resourceful.
SEOBook’s Keyword Tool - Similar to Google’s but provides more information. Very useful.
SEMRush Keyword Tool - Best Keyword tool out there. Gives you a bunch of useful information including websites that appear on organic and paid listings.

Link Tools - Tools that give you information about Linking.
Link Popularity Tool - Easy to use tool to determine how popular a specific link is.
Site Linking Analyzer - Another great tool that checks the anchor text and information about links on a website.
Link Popularity Checker - Another link popularity checker.

Other Tools - Other useful tools that will help.
Search Engine Saturation Tool - See how many pages a search engine has indexed for your website.
Google Webmaster Tools - Great tool to update sitemaps for Google and to see search queries for your website.
Google Analytics - Best and Easiest to use Analytical software out there. It’s also free.

There are a lot of tools out there. I use a bunch of other tools as well but these tools are the some of the first I go for where I try to get information when starting an SEO campaign. If you have any other tools that you use, feel free to share them in the comments.

With Adwords… Sometimes Less is More

pitchblende — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 04:34:52 +0000

I was asked this evening about whether it is appropriate to use sentences for Google Adwords Ads instead of phrases and sentence fragments. The biggest thing to remember with Google Adwords is that often times less is more. The most successful campaigns for Adwords are the ones that give the best information the customer requires in the least amount of time. While it is true that a top listed ad will receive a larger amount of clicks, if the copywrite isn’t appropriate that proportion will reduce greatly.

Writing an effective ad for Google Adwords requires three things:

1. Relevancy to the keyword or keyphrase that is being advertised.

2. A successful short description about what is being offered.

3. A call to action to get the potential customer to click your ad.

Some websites like to point out tricks to increase CTR such as formating your ad in a certain way. However, if your ad is revelant to what is being searched for, it will receive clicks. As far as the phrases versus sentences debate, it really just depends. However, a simple description that gets the point across is always much more effective than one that is complex is takes longer to understand. When searchers are looking at search results, they are only spending a few seconds on each listing before they determine whether it is relevant or not. A great ad is one that catches a searchers attention not one that looks like a dictionary listing.

Viral Marketing for Small Businesses

pitchblende — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 02:58:56 +0000

Often when I hear about a new business starting off I hear that they have a word-of-mouth strategy. Of course that is a good strategy if it works because it’s free and the customers are always familiar with your business before any work begins. Unfortunately, how long can you run a business on the word of mouth? Well if you are fortunate enough, you can run it for a long time. What it requires is a little viral marketing online to reach every potential customer that you can.

Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive flash games, ebooks, free software, images, or even text messages. The most basic forms of viral marketing isn’t infinitely successful but it can give you a great start to supplement other products or introduce new products. One example of viral marketing is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. While Internet Explorer doesn’t provide much revenue for Microsoft it supplements other core products like Microsoft Office and increases brand awareness.

Now Viral marketing can take virtually any form, the goal is to offer something that is free and is of limited cost to you. Using marketing strategies such as providing easy “Link to Friend” and “Share this Page” links will help your marketing campaign go viral and increase brand attention to your product or service.

You are probably asking how viral marketing can help a small business? Well that is an a question that can be answered in millions of ways. First off, viral marketing is usually cheap and easy to create. If you are a local home improvement company, you can upload instructional videos to youtube to increase awareness of your company and let potential customers know about your skills. If you are a small grocery store in a community, you can have a “Share this Page” with a friend or even recipes on your website that customers can easily link to one another.

Viral marketing is supposed to be a simple and catchy item that can easily be distributed amongst the masses. Make sure that you provide an easy way to spread the link either by creating a digg.com submission or a “link to friend” form. The small cost of viral marketing should pay of once your campaign goes viral. Just remember that like word of mouth marketing or advertising, the communication chains have their limits as well.

What is your Google Analytics IQ?

pitchblende — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 04:10:34 +0000

Google is launching online learning classes for Google Analytics with the aim that users will take advantage of the upcoming Google Analytics Individual Qualification or Google Analytics IQ test. It appears that Google is finally trying to cash in on some of their free tools. Google Analytics has been free since Google bought Urchin in 2005. I have been using Google Analytics since about that time and I will definitely take the examination for the GAIQ.

“A recent survey by marketing firm Altrian found that fewer than half of online marketers made use of any type of Web analytics,” said Mark Simon of Digit. That is a tremondous loss of opportunity that online marketers are missing out on. Analytical software allows the website owner to learn vital data about customer browsing habits that can improve several aspects of a website.

If you are looking for an Online Marketing company it is essential that they have experience with some type of analytical software. What good is a campaign if it is not being tracked properly.

Does Online Advertising Give the Best ROI?

pitchblende — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 03:43:55 +0000

This is a common question that I often face when I approach a customer. They often wonder if something that only attracts one person, one click at a time is worth the cost. It’s an interesting question because you always want to use the medium that brings in the most revenue for the least amount of money. My honest answer is that it really depends on your business. However, the truth is that any business can benefit from online exposure. Whether that is just a simple website or a complex e-commerce solution depends on the type of business. I have three suggestions for businesses when it comes towards implementing an online marketing campaign.

1. Can you recoup the costs you made for a particular strategy within one year? That is to say if you build a website will you get enough business out of it within one year to make it worth it. Usually if the website is built right, that should be no problem. This question can be applied to any kind of online marketing campaign (PPC, CPM, Email, SEO, etc).

2. Do you have a grasp of what the campaign aims to achieve? If you aren’t computer savvy, it is in your best interest to learn what is taking place if you invest in online marketing. Don’t hire someone to do it for you and assume it’s being done correctly. Always stay on top of them. I encourage my customers to be active when I’m creating an online marketing campaign for them. You get the best ROI when you are active in the decision making.

3. There is always room for improvement. Maybe you won’t see any improvement out of the metrics or statistics but there is always room for improvement with online advertising and marketing. One example is expanding your budget to launch a new campaign for a different product line or trying to get “double ranked” on google. There is a reason why managed online marketing services cost what they do. An experienced online marketing professional should be continously improving what they are doing. If you end up paying for a discount service, odds are that you are getting a discount on the quality of service.

So to answer the question of whether online advertising gives the best ROI? It’s a loaded question but there is always a return if the investment is executed correctly.

Google Search Network - Is It Worth It?

pitchblende — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 02:04:26 +0000

Many don’t know but there is a big difference between advertising on Google Search and the Google Search Network. When you advertise on Google Search you are advertising on Google.com and perhaps sister google websites like Google.jp and other international sites. However, when you advertise on the Google Search Network you are advertising on several other search engines and “related” websites where search advertising could also prove beneficial. I’ve decided to investigate what are some of the Google Search Network sites. Here is a list that I’ve compiled that shows you what you get when you opt-in.

Google’s Search Network Partners:

Actual Search Engines
AOL.com
Netscape.com
Earthlink.com
Lycos.com
ATT.com
Ask.com
TechTarget.com
ComCast.net
CNET Search.com
MyWebSearch.com
information.com
myway.com
bellsouth.net
dogpile.com
adelphia.net
comcast.net
earthlink.net
optonline.net

And here are some non-search sites that are included in the Google Search Network.

About.com
Shopping.com (via About)CompuServe.com
nytimes.com - Come on Google, Really?
howstuffworks.com
business.com
oingo.com
Tripadvisor.com
dealtime.com
infospace.com
zapmeta.com
gppgle.com
faster-results.com
gawwk.com
inspirationalbibleverses.com
isohunt.com
1.24
cs.com
curiousquotes.com
findtarget.com

I think it’s time that Google start creating a true Google Search Network so that customers that want to advertise on search engines can do so correctly. I’d love to advertise on AOL and Ask.com but I can only guess how ineffective advertising on nytimes.com is for customer’s websites.

Online Marketing for Lake County, Ohio Businesses

pitchblende — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:44:55 +0000

There is an obvious void for Lake County businesses. That void is online marketing services for small and medium sized businesses. As technology grows so much companies and unfortunately our region is behind the rest of country with it comes to taking advantage of new techniques to connecting with customers. As the only Google Adwords Certified Professional in the county, I can offer personalized services that help companies reach all their possible customers.

Managed Adwords PPC Campaigns

pitchblende — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:17:41 +0000

With over 5 years of online marketing experience, I offer managed pay-per-click services for businesses of any size. Google Adwords is a medium that allows you to reach targeted customers right when they are ready to buy. My experience with Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft Ad Center creates the opportunity for qualified customers to visit your website and perform a designed action. Any type of business can benefit from a PPC campaign. Whether you are a local business looking to drive in customers to your store or a global business just looking to establish your brand online, I can help.