Mobile Web Site

Mobile web browsing is on the rise with an estimate of almost 100 million monthly mobile users browsing the web. This number is certain to rise in the coming years.

Here are a few reasons to add a mobile site in addition to your main site.

• Smaller pages for smaller screen and faster loading times
• Mobile use will continue tto rise in the foreseeable future
• Searchers are often looking for a quick way to find contact details
• People are often searching for stores and businesses close to their current location, these are high conversion searches

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization is the art and science maximizing your website’s exposure on search engines like Google. Essentially, you are tying to increase the chance that someone searching for a product or service finds your website on search engines. Techniques include keyword research, content optimization, and making sure search engines can easily crawl and index your site.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Pay Per Click is similar to Search Engine Optimization but with a PPC campaign you are literally paying to get to the top. You might be asking yourself, why would anyone pay for SEO when they could just pay to get to the top with PPC?  Take a look at the image below to see the difference.

PPC’s main advantage over SEO is that you can pay to get to the top and you only pay when someone clicks on your link. The disadvantage is the area PPC ads occupy in search engine results tend to get ignored by most users and once you run out of budget you are removed immediately from the results. An SEO campaign can have longer lasting effects even after you stop paying for it and people click on those results in search engines more often. Both have their place in the internet marketing world. The key is to find out what is best for you.

Social Media

Social media is being leveraged more and more as a way for businesses to communicate with their clients and customers. People can stay up to date with their favorite stores, restaurants, and businesses through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more. Having the ability to quickly communicate with your customers is a strategy worth considering.

Your e-commerce store can post promo codes, your restaurant can post daily specials, or just talk to your customers and get to know them.

The great thing about social media is the costs are very low. You can pay a professional to do social media marketing for you or you can set up social media accounts yourself. The choice is yours!

Email Marketing

Like social media, email marketing is another way to communicate quickly to your customers. With email marketing you can collect email addresses from customers, people who visit your website, people who you meet at conferences and other business gatherings.

Through social media you have to wait for people to follow you on Twitter or ‘Like’ your page on Facebook but with email marketing you can build a database of names. Of course, you want to do this within reason. Buying a list of names from another company or spamming people’s inbox will get you nowhere. Only send to people you have a business relationship with.

Analytics

Google Analytics and other analaytics programs allow you to track a great deal about your website and it’s visitors. You can track:

• Keywords that are being used to find your site
• Under performing pages or pages that are really popular
• How long people are staying and what they are doing when they are on there

You can have someone set up analytics for you but its also a great idea to have a professional review the analytics with you monthly. This will allow you to take action based on the results to improve your website continuously.

Five Can Help

We believe a complete internet marketing strategy starts with having a great website that is enhanced by these other great services. You may not want to include them all and that is fine! We can help you build a strategy and find out what is best for you and your business.

Give us a call: 763-972-5933

Research

The cornerstone of every successful SEO campaign is research. Keyword research, market research, and competitor research are all a must. Without proper research your SEO campaign could be targeting unrelated keywords or targeting the wrong market entirely. Before hiring an SEO company make sure that research is something they value. Ask them if they are willing to share with you the results of keyword research.

Better User Experience

Part of the SEO battle is getting your site to appear in search engines for well researched keywords. The rest of the battle is delivering informational content, turning potential customers into paying customers, and turning one time readers into returning readers. Sometimes lost in the shuffle to get more traffic to your website is the ability to keep people interested once they reach your site. Before hiring an SEO company you need to make sure they are considering what happens once someone clicks on the site. Targeting unrelated keywords, keyword stuffing, and not adhering to great usability and design standards may gain more traffic but not quality traffic. Make your SEO company agree to using no spamming tactics that will almost certainly not work out in the long run.

Break Down the Quote

When your potential SEO company gives you a quote or proposal, look for a break down of services to be performed. If they do not provide a break down, do not be afraid to ask for one.

Here are some MUST HAVES:

• Site Audit for Technical Issues – There are many issues that can prevent search engines from effectively indexing a website. Among them are duplicate pages, broken links, and bad URLs.
• Keyword Research – The keyword research to find the keywords your site should target is vital to the success of any SEO campaign. So vital in fact, that if this step is skipped no SEO campaign will reach its maximum return on investment.
• Content Optimization – Using the knowledge gained from keyword research the next step is to optimize your website’s content.

If you have the budget, I would additionally recommend link building, local search optimization, & social media optimization.

Lets take a look at some of the SEO benefits of blogging.

Fresh Content

People love fresh content. Google knows that the average searcher would prefer to read content written recently with the most up to date information. Sites updated often with fresh & relevant content are more likely to be indexed by Google sooner than a site that has had the same content since 2001.

Links

Informative blog posts will often attract links. Lets say Johnny is an online marketer and has an online marketing website. Johnny writes a blog post titled “The top ten online marketing trends of 2011″. If Google sees that people are linking to Johnny’s blog post, Google will start to think Johnny knows a thing or two about online marketing trends in 2011. Not only that but since the blog post was about online marketing on Johnny’s online marketing website, the entire website gets a boost for its SEO because the blog post is relevant to the overall theme of online marketing. A blog post that receives links from outside sources raises the SEO trust and authority of the entire website as long as the blog post is relevant to the rest of the content on the website. With this knowledge you can start to see where having numerous blog posts that receive links will be beneficial to the entire website.

Taking the Leap

Many businesses understand the benefit to blogging but still fearful of starting a blog. Do not fear blogging! Blog about what you know, blog about the industry you are in. If you feel unsure about taking an authoritative expert tone then keep it conversational. Keep an eye out for a future blog post from Five with tips on how to optimize your blog effectively to maximize the SEO benefit.

Google Places
The video is a great visual and base level explanation of how local search rankings are displayed, compiled and ranked for Google Places.

The video outlines these three main ranking factors:

• Relevance – results that categorically match what has been searched
• Prominence – results that are “well known, trusted” and show solid data from other sources on the web
• Distance – results that are near your search criteria or known location

The latest changes to Google Places have changed both the display of local search results as well as the algorithm used to rank them.  Where local used to have its own formula, now organic search trust heavily plays in your local ranking.

More Local Search Products
Along with the Google Places changes, new products focused on local search have hit the scene in the last year.  The video covers these three:

• Google HotPot: rate places and get personalized recommendations (think Yelp)
• Google Tags: visual tags that help your local listing stand out ($25/month flat fee)
• Google Boost:  a paid local search advertising option, controlled from your Place page

I’ve already increased the amount of reviews I’ve been leaving for businesses thanks to HotPot.  The interface is so simple and even kind of fun.  All of these products are aimed at a quality local search experiences for the user, but a savvy business can employ all of these to its advantage.

Of course Five can help with your local search marketing needs on all of these fronts.  It’s exciting to see the local search space get so much attention, improvement and tools and we don’t see that changing.

It’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.

The Beginning of Something Great?
When James hollered at me about MNsem launching, my reaction was “Finally!”.  There are so many great search minds in the Twin Cities as well as those with a desire to learn more on search, let’s find a way to get together.

My thoughts and hopes for MNsem:

• Lots of sharing, open to all interested
• Hit all the aspects of search: local, PPC, organic and on and on
• Education, workshops, structured topics
• Improve our industry’s visibility
• Have fun!

Event one was great.  I caught up with familiar friends and faces and connected with a ton of great new people.  I think close to 50 attended.

Connect with MNsem on Twitter:  @MNsem or on LinkedIn

Here are some more photos from the night.

Paul Jahn and I, great friend & local search guru.

James, Clint & Lisa address the crowd

FRWD has a great view of Target Field from their 11th floor offices

(View full Google Preview search screenshot)

I think this is a fabulous feature for the user and it also plays into the hands of those who create well designed websites and content pages.  Not only does the searcher have a meta title and description tag to factor into what they click, but now a visual of the destination.

In Google’s research so far, they have found that people who use Instant Previews are about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click.

Good Web Design Can Bring Clicks
It’s always been true, but good design and content structure step up a notch in importance with this feature.  Consider these web design techniques to create a page that increases the chances your search result is clicked:

1.First impressions. They’re everything right?  Previewing a page with a clean, professional web design will only help you stand out from the other results.

2. A big and clear page content title. The preview is often big enough that the title of the page will clearly show up. Seeing the keywords in the title will only build trust that your page has the needed information.

3. Good content structure. If your page looks like a giant block of text, you’re likely to get skipped.  The web is a scanable read, so having a preview that shows well organized content, brief paragraphs, bullet pointed content and good uses of headers and sub-headers will let the searcher know your page will be easy to read.

The feature will even block and highlight text from your page it perceives as being the most relevant to the search.

4. The mix of content types like photos, video and graphics. Many users will prefer to access a page with strong visuals as well as text content.  Seeing that your result has a graph, photo or video like the example below to accompany the text will separate you from all of the non-visual results.

5. Flash? Forget it. As you can see from the example below, Google’s preview feature will not display Flash.  For me, just add that to the other 100 reasons not to use Flash as a main design element in your web design.

These are just my first observations and we’ll see the proof as Google rolls search previews out in the coming days.

I’m rarely excited for a change in SERPS, but this one plays right into the recipe that we’ve used for years: Good web design and good content can be created and optimized for great results.

• You can  take this search feature for a test drive here.

What are your thoughts on Google’s Preview feature?

The event was rock solid and I enjoyed sessions on web analytics, content strategy, online community building, mobile and more.   I didn’t poll the hundreds in attendance, but heard many comments on the quality of this years event.  Outside of the sessions, time spent with other presenters Jeff Sauer, Aaron Landry, Chris Silver Smith and Nathan Eide made for great discussions and fun.

Small Business SEO
The MIMA Summit seems to carry a bigger agency type feel for the programs and attendees, but a few sessions catered to the small business.  I spoke on Small Business  SEO On A Shoestring and had a great time presenting and fielding questions. My slides are below.

A big thanks to the MIMA board for inviting me to present and all of the volunteers that made the 2010 event so great.

BTW – My first preso slide contains my ALL TIME favorite shoes as a kid, ’89 Air Jordans.

MIMA Summit 2010 – September 27th & 28th
The Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association’s annual Summit is an event to be reckoned with.  I’m excited to be presenting a session on Small Business SEO On A Shoestring Tuesday morning.

I’m humbled to be part of a speaking line-up that includes Gary Vaynerchuk, Chris Silver Smith, Jeff Sauer and some other talented Internet minds I enjoy and learn from often.

Local University Denver – October 21st
You won’t find a better small business Internet marketing seminar for the money than GetListed.org’s Local U series. The same as the  Minneapolis Local U event earlier this year, I’ll be heading the session on Intro to Search Engines.  Covering local search from many angles as well as social media and SEO, this event is the best in pure information and best practices.

Don’t miss out on speakers David Mihm, Ed Reese, Mike Blumenthal, Mary Bowling and Matt McGee.  Sign-up and use promo code five2010 to get $40 off the ticket, it’s just $89 for the 1/2 day session!  Go ahead and sign-up.

4 Quarters Design & Build is a Five Tech client that witnessed this bleed first hand.  Their recently redesigned website earned them the opportunity to take part in a TV news story and gain valuable offline exposure for their business.

A recent deck collapse in the Twin Cities led the WCCO reporter to find a deck construction expert to contribute to their story.   A quick search on Google by the TV reporter and he had his expert, 4 Quarters owner Brian Jacobson.

Building Credibility
It’s easy to see that the key to a successful website and online marketing is credibility.  The right look and feel, helpful content and other elements all contribute to your website being viewed as a trusted resource.  That resource might be needed by a search engine or by a TV reporter, either way the benefits can be numerous.

Congrats to 4 Quarters and Brian on the air time, can we get your autograph?

This week I had the opportunity to speak on search engine optimization at a conference put on by the Immunization Action Coalition out in Philadelphia.  The conference is called the Social Media Summit and focuses on helping the medical and health community bring awareness to vaccinations, immunizations and health using social media and Internet marketing.

My role was sitting down with many of the various organizations attending and conducting a review of their website and search engine optimization efforts.  In my hour sessions I focused on SEO best practices, establishing trust online and offered action items for their websites to improve their websites visibility to Google, Bing & Yahoo.

It was a fun challenge to work with medical and health organizations both large and small and discuss websites ranging from 15 pages to 50,000 pages and the  efforts needed to optimize content and spread their message online.  From building links to maximizing your meta page title, we covered a lot of ground.

Organizations I worked with over the 2 days included:

• American Academy of Family Physicians
• ECBT – Vaccinate Your Baby
• National Association of School Nurses
• Autism Science Foundation
• National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners
• National Network of Immunization Nurses and Associates

The conference also engaged some other social media professionals to launch a social campaign right from the conference for Real Guys Immunize.  A very cool idea for a conference.

The best news is that I didn’t have to get any shots to take part in this conference, but I did learn some valuable information on vaccines and children.  My thanks to all of the great attendees I met, the Immunization Action Coalition and Eventive Meetings.