Posts Tagged ‘online marketing’

Do You Know Where You Want To Be?

Tuesday, December 28th, 2010

So, the first of the year is only a few days away. You probably have BIG plans for your website and business this year. You may plan on devoting more time and money to promoting your business online this year. You probably have some high online marketing goals that you are setting now, like search engine ranking goals. If you do, what do you REALLY know about where you want to be?

Competition

You probably have a list of keywords that you want to rank “first page” for. Have you done some searches to see who is there? There are several things you will want to look for:

  • Are the results relevant to your business?
  • Who is currently there?
  • What are your competitor stats?

Relevancy

You know your business. You may think you know what terms are good to rank for, you may even be right. But a good practice is to actually do the searches and see who is there. Just because you associate certain terms with your business, the general public may not. You could be surprised when you do some searches and see that some of the keywords you thought were money could potentially put you in bad company. Just be sure to check and ensure that the keywords you target are relevant to your business.

Competitor Analysis

It’s VERY important to know who is there and why. There is only so much real estate on the first page of any search engine results page. Below are some important things to look for:

  • How old are the domains currently on page 1?
  • How many inbound links do they have?
  • How many pages indexed do they have?
  • How are they setting-up their pages?
  • How is their domain structured?

These are the basics that you will want to analyze. This will help you determine what you may need to do in order to achieve the online results of your competitors. RhinoSEO makes it quick and easy to check these competitor analysis stats. You can take this data and set certain benchmarks that may need to be met in order to knock off a competitor and take their place on the coveted first page.

There is only so much space on the first page of the search engine results pages. It’s important to know who is there and what it may take for you to get there. Research and competitor analysis is the perfect place to begin any successful online marketing campaign.

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Top 5 Online Marketing Infographics

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

1: The CMO’s Guide to The Social Landscape

Social Media Infographic

2: Are We Addicted to the Internet?

Internet Infograph

3: Google’s Long History of Social Media Attemps

4: How Mobile Phones are Changing Social Media

5: What People do Online

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Now Offering Free Inbound Marketing Software!

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

RhinoSEO releases free version* of their popular inbound marketing software.

RhinoSEO Inbound Marketing Software

Charleston, SC – August 2010 – RhinoSEO, a leading online marketing services company, releases a version of their popular inbound marketing software for free. Now website owners that want to try inbound marketing can do so without paying hundreds or thousands of dollars. Start your free subscription today!

“We are a service based company with an effective toolset that can really help people promote their business. We just don’t feel that businesses should have to pay an arm and a leg for an inbound marketing tool and wanted to make it available for small businesses.” says Adam Coburn, Founder of RhinoSEO.

RhinoSEO’s software is a robust tool that enables users to:

  • Analyze website traffic
  • Grade their website as well as their competitors
  • Track keyword rankings
  • Monitor inbound links
  • Run email marketing campaigns
  • Manage web leads
  • Create forms and landing pages on the fly
  • Social media monitoring and integration
  • and more!

The software is a fully functional tool that allows users to get the most of their online marketing. With RhinoSEO’s software, users have the ability to gain in-depth knowledge of their website visitors and better convert those visitors to leads. RhinoSEO comes with comprehensive analytics, email marketing capabilities, lead management system, social media engagement and more. No longer will business need to use multiple tools for their online marketing. RhinoSEO’s software is an all encompassing, free solution to effectively promote businesses online.

Beyond the free software RhinoSEO also offers a premium subscription that includes CMS, CRM integration, API usage, and extended metrics for $100/month. Hosting is not required.

*bandwidth restrictions apply


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Posted in inbound marketing, online marketing, RhinoSEO | No Comments »

Taking Control of Your Web Presence

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

We have seen it time and time again as web developers. Website owners also know this situation very well.

A person has decided to change their website. (The change also means changing service providers.) The headache comes when most website owners find that the service provider also hosts their website. Not only that, but many times it is built using a proprietary CMS that risks hindering the website should it be moved.

So now a string of questions must be asked, solved, and action taken just to access the information needed. Hours are wasted, money spent, and nothing has happened except switching service providers.

We have always aimed to solve this problem once and for all for clients. (Atleast the headache part of it). As a website owner, your web presence is crucial to business operations. Why should you allow service providers to control the stability of that?

Hosting
First let’s look at hosting. It is necessary for a website owner to own and control their own hosting environment. Many times, you can find fully supported hosting providers with rates at a fraction of the cost of what your service provider up-sells to you. Sure you might still need someone to service the website, but what you have done is eliminated the middle man between you and your website. If you need to change service providers, it is as simple as calling a new firm and giving them access.

CMS
Many firms sell their services based on the convenience factor of having an all in one Content Management System. You don’t need to do anything. You host with them, use their editing tools to make changes and you have to do very little. What they usually don’t tell you is that your website will be put on a generic template system that will make it look almost identical to every other site they have on the system. Your website is unique and needs to be expressed that way. Something else that you might not see before signing up is the captive nature of the content edited on the system. If you decided to upgrade your site, you have run into a very troublesome situation. What if you want to move to another service provider? Good luck with the transition. It will cost many hours to change for your new needs.

This is where WordPress comes in. This solves the issues created by using locked in ‘all-in-one’ website systems. Not only can you control your website hosting, but you can run it on what is easily the most recognized CMS on the planet. Plus it’s FREE!!

So we have already identified the freedom you get by going this route. Are there other advantages? Sure! WordPress is backed by a large community. It has thousands of plugins that will enhance the usability of your website. It can take care of anything and everything a generic proprietary system can minus the costs.

You then have the ability to take the code, database, and your website freely to any hosting provider. You own and control it all.

These are the problems RhinoSEO identifies and tackles with a client’s best interests in mind. It is important to spot potential ‘lock in’ offerings that are aimed at bettering the service provider’s bottom line. Don’t pay for convenience. Pay for control and the same conveniences come with it. Stop the vicious cycle of headaches caused by changing services providers.

You will thank yourself for the decision later!

Who can identify with the problems addressed in this post?

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Don’t You Hate This?

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

Click to enlarge.

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Do You Know Where Your Leads Come From?

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

Let’s face it, the main motive behind online marketing is to generate something. Depending on your business, it could be to generate leads, sales, traffic for ads etc. That being said, once you get a lead, what do you do?

Tracking

If you have spent time and money on SEO or any other type of online marketing, you have prepped your website to become another salesperson. In any sales organization, sales people are measured by their performance. You should have the same set-up for your online marketing.

You most likely have some type of web analytics you use. It tells you all kinds of cool stuff about your visitors, but is it set-up to tell you about your leads? Most analytics have a way to set-up some sort of lead tracking. In Google Analytics you would want to configure your goals and funnels so you can go back and learn more about your leads. If you use RhinoSEO, you have a lead management system built-in.

You want to have a way to look at how your visitors became leads.

Analyze

It is important to learn from your leads and analytics. When you are lucky enough to get new web leads, take a minute to analyze how they became a lead. Some of the things you’ll want to look at are:

  • Referring source
  • Visitor navigation
  • Visitor frequency

Referring source is probably the main thing you will want to look at. This can give you a lot of insight as to how people are finding your site. This give you the opportunity to evaluate how well your online marketing efforts are working. It can also shed some light into how your prospects search or which inbound links are sending you quality traffic.

This information can help you tailor your online marketing strategy around what works instead of wasting time on what doesn’t. Find what is working and why and do your best to replicate it.

Visitor navigation tells you what your prospects and leads are most interested in. You can see what product/services were most viewed and for how long. This will help you custom tailor your sales pitch and drip marketing around what you know they like.

Visitor frequency is how many times someone visits your site. Find out more about your online sales cycle. People might visit 2-3 times before they fill out a form. Make on site tweaks and monitor if you can shorten the amount of visits it takes before they convert into a lead.

The more you learn about how visitors become leads, the more successful your online marketing and conversions will become.

(image credit)


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Why SEO Alone is Being Phased Out

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

Is SEO dead? Not hardly. SEO is more important than it ever was before due to the large percentage of businesses online today. But is SEO the determining factor for a websites success? Today’s businesses need to employ a full arsenal of online marketing strategies to be successful.

SEO

SEO is the foundation of any solid online marketing strategy. A well optimized site puts the business in position to be found by thousands of potential customers who are actively searching for what you offer. SEO is a strong force for a websites success, but it isn’t the only online marketing tactic that will drive qualified traffic.

Social Media

SEO is perfect for pulling in targeted visitors to your site, although search engine optimization takes time. Social media is a great way to get your message to the masses fast. Social media helps you connect with your audience, gives your business a voice and allows your messages an opportunity to go viral. A well planned social media strategy can send thousands of visitors to your website in a short period of time building brand awareness and new backlinks to your site.

Email Marketing

How to you maximize your contacts and leads? Email marketing. Create campaigns to stay in front of your prospects and customers so you increase the chances of repeat visitors and conversions. Use marketing emails to educate and promote. Add social media elements to your email marketing to really maximize your reach.

PR

The lines between social media and PR are beginning to blur a little. Both are effective and work in similar ways. Use press releases on a regular basis to announce new news about your company and industry. Solid PR can spread your messages to the masses.

Add diversity to your online marketing campaigns and you’ll notice a steady stream of web traffic coming from multiple sources. Think of these strategies as long term commitments instead of short term campaigns. Measure, tweak and analyze to increase your conversions and build a successful website and thriving business.

Don’t just stop with SEO, add other online marketing activities to the mix. SEO is not being phased out, but being added to creating more well rounded online marketing efforts.

(image credit)

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The Secret to a Well Optimized Web Page

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

Once you select your keywords, the next step in a solid online marketing system is to optimize each page on your website. In the keyword research step, you should have selected some solid niche keywords that best describe everything that you do. You will want to break these terms up and distribute them among all of your web pages. I suggest 2-3 different keywords for each page. Be sure that they match your content and are relevant to the page.

Title Tags

Title tags are one of the most important things to optimize and are weighted heavily by the search engines. Like I mentioned earlier, you want to select 2-3 keywords that are unique to each individual page. It is recommended to place the more competitive keywords first (at the far left) and the less competitive after. The first couple words in the title tag carry the most weight. You can separate the keyphrases by a divider |, colon : or comma ,. I prefer a divider but I’m not real sure if it really matters what you use. If some of your keyphrases are long, you might just want to place 1-2 terms in the title tag.

Url

I also suggest you use your main keyword in the domain extension as well. For example, yoursite.com/keyword. This will help the page become more relevant to your term in the eyes of the search engines. If your page is already set-up another way, it might behoove you to change them. If you do, be sure to do a 301 redirect from the old url to the new so you don’t lose any links and page authority.

Meta

In the old days of SEO, this section was your gold mine. Not anymore. The meta keywords tag is pretty much worthless now, but I still include them as a best practice. The days of “keyword stuffing” are a thing of the past and if you do it can actually hurt you. I normally just use around 2-8 keywords in the meta keywords tag. Another thing to remember is just like the title tags, make your meta keywords unique to each page as well. Try not to duplicate terms from page to page.

You’ll get different opinions on the meta description tags depending on who you talk to. Many industry professionals say that including keywords in the meta description tag hold no value to the search engines. My experience says otherwise. I basically recommend trying to fit in your main keyword somewhere in your meta description. Other than that, you are basically writing/optimizing for humans. The description is your opportunity to convince someone to click your link in the search engine results page.

<H> tags

Think of optimizing your keywords from the top of the page on down. Title tag, url and the next stop is the <h> tags. Mainly the h1 tag. If you can have it make sense and not look spammy, try to include your keywords in your <h> tags. If you have a lot of content on the page, it is recommended to break the content up into sections and divide each section with various <h> tags. For example, your header would be an <h1> tag, sub headers would be <h2> or <h3> tags. You should try to use only one <h1> tag but multiple <h2> or <h3> tags is ok.

Content

Optimizing your content basically means to try to repeat your keywords a few times in your content. Do not keyword stuff your content. Write your content for real people and just try to repeat your key terms in a few times. People mention keyword density. There really is no real magic number to strive for, but some experts recommend somewhere between 2-6%. Do try to squeeze your main keyword in the first sentence of your copy and somewhere near the bottom of your page content as well.

Interlinking

Page navigation does not have to be limited to your nav bar. Interlinking terms and pages works well for your visitors as well as the search engines. The trick is to hyperlink your keywords. For example, you want to hyperlink the main keyword that the link is pointing to.

Alt tags

Search engines are smart, but they can’t read images. What they can read though is alt tags. Alt tags are used to describe what the image is. If it makes sense and doesn’t look spammy, use a keyword in your alt tag as well.

Keyword research and on page optimization are the foundation to a solid online marketing system and key to strong search engine rankings.

Stay tuned for next weeks post as we continue our online marketing system blog series.

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Posted in online marketing | 1 Comment »

How to Guide to Online Keyword Research

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

SherlockOnline keyword research is the foundation of any SEO campaign. It is the first step and everything builds on top of it which is why we’ll begin our online marketing system series with online keyword research.

Why is this the first step?

It is important to find the right keywords. You need a good set of relevant and well searched keyphrases to build around. You want to research key terms that best describe your business. You will use these keywords when optimizing your site, both on and off page.

Where do I start?

First, think about some of the phrases someone might type into their browser to find a company like yours. Think of the products you sell and services you offer. Start off thinking in broad terms and then drill down to more specific terms. Try to put yourself in your customers shoes using terms you think they would use to search. Next, add some industry keywords that you and people in your industry use to describe various elements of your business. This way you cover both those who are not familiar and very familiar with your type of business.

Now you have a good base of keywords to research.

How do I know which ones to use?

This is where the real magic happens! You’ll need a good online keyword research tool to help you gauge which of these keywords you selected are worth pursuing.

There are three main things to research: relevancy, monthly search volume and competition.

You definitely want to use keywords that are relevant to your business. Don’t get distracted by how many searches some phrases might get. This is one of the best ways to control who visits your website and this is your opportunity to target your desired visitors.

Next, research the monthly search volume your potential keywords get. Keep in mind that typically the higher the searches, the higher the competition. However, you generally want to try to find keywords that get at least 1,000 searches per month. This ensures that you are rewarded for all the hard work you will put in to optimizing for these terms.

Time to pan for gold. You want to find keywords that get a healthy search volume but aren’t too competitive. This is key. Now there might be some solid money terms that you want to pursue regardless of how competitive they are. Just keep in mind that the more competitive the keyword, the more work you’ll have to do and the longer it will take to move up in the search rankings.

Online keyword research is the one task you want to spend some time on to ensure you select a good set of terms. This most likely won’t be a one and done event as you will be monitoring how well your keywords perform. In time you’ll want to analyze how many visitors these keywords send you and how well they convert into leads and sales.

(image credit)

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Online Marketing System Blog Series Coming Soon!

Friday, May 7th, 2010

If you are not currently subscribing to our blog, now might be a good time to do so. Beginning next week we will start our Online Marketing System blog series. This series will cover various ways to promote your business through online marketing. This is a good opportunity to learn how to use social media, SEO, email marketing, webinars and online marketing tools to generate traffic and leads.

We will release a new post every week so don’t miss it!

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