Best Practices for Search Engine Marketing

 

Internet Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

In this economy, any marketing tool you can use to find new customers is worth considering. But perhaps the best marketing tool available to many small businesses is a well designed website. Such a site means prospective local customers looking for a business like yours know that you're in business and ready for their patronage.

While the traffic statistics of the typical small business web site may not impress Google, eBay or Amazon.com, many small business websites do generate significant numbers of prospects compared to the other marketing tools available. Commonly, for example, small business websites can attract anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred new unique visitors on a daily basis. And that's a lot!

Setting up one of these Internet marketing web sites just doesn't have to be that complicated or expensive. Often times, employing the following half a dozen tips lets you enjoy surprising success:

Tip #1: Evaluate Your Competition

It’s no big secret: PPC is competitive. And any advantage you can get is always an edge. The hardest part is finding the edge you can leverage effectively, efficiently, and strike a resonating blow. It sounds like war because it is. Pay Per Click (PPC) generals need to find and exploit the weaknesses of competition.

Small businesses face a number of challenges in the PPC battleground, chief among them is that they have smaller budgets than their larger competitors.  Meaning, for highly competitive and general keywords within a vertical, it’s difficult to compete.  As such, brute force click-bids are impossible leverage because your competition will effectively price you out. Therefore, small businesses must leverage the one strength that a majority of them possess: small guerrilla marketing.

You know what your business-centric keywords are. You dredged your analytics for the keywords driving traffic and conversions. You’ve got your negative keywords in place to guard against unqualified click traffic.  Whatever words you’ve found, you can bet your competitors found too.  Here’s where your research skills come in.

Take a handful of keywords you’ve found and search them.  You’ll be looking at company names you’ve never heard of before.  That’s your market share competition now; those are companies you need to research and create a PPC strategy around.

To keep trying to outmaneuver larger competitors, it requires keen knowledge of the Search Engine Marketing business.  With PPC Campaigns, dollars don’t always make the difference.  Today, Quality is the key. 

Now that you’ve identified the top competitors, it’s time to find out what other keywords they bid on. And what they don’t. Drop in your competitor’s URLs and/or keywords and get tons of valuable information. From ads to ad spend trend lines to a fairly complete list of keywords each competitor is paying for.

• iSpionage

• SpyFu

• Keyword Spy

You can find out where you overlap in keywords, especially on larger terms, but more importantly, you can find out what keywords they’re NOT buying. You can adjust your strategy to take advantage and leverage the mid-tail and long-tail keywords your competition may be under-bidding and/or ignoring all together. Additionally, you can adjust your strategy to hone in on the more general keywords you can’t live without.

Tip #2: Get Smart about your Domain Name

One caution: You won't want to make the mistake that I made. In other words, if you can avoid it, you don't want to name your business using your name or some meaningless if clever phrase.

For my Seattle area CPA firm, I named my domain name stephenlnelson.com and have spent the last dozen years telling people, "No, with a 'ph'...not a 'v' and don't forget the 'l'...."  Rather you want to use search words, also known as keywords, in your domain name. For example, if you operate a drycleaner located in town named Pine Lake, try to get something like PineLakeDrycleaners dot com.

Putting search words in your domain name will make your website easier to find when people use those search words. In other words, search engines are more likely to display a website named PineLakeDrycleaners.com when someone searches on phrases like "drycleaning pine lake," drycleaners in pine lake," "pine lake dryclean," and so on.

Tip #3: Add Your Site to Google Maps

If you include your business address on your web pages--and you should--Google will probably, eventually, display your business's website when people search for a local business like yours.

If your business's web site isn't appearing when someone searches for local businesses like yours, you can visit the Google maps page and then click on the Put Your Business on Google Maps link to begin the process of adding your business to Google's local search results.

Tip #4: Win the Local Links Competition

You're going to need to get more inbound links pointing to your site than point to your competitors' sites in order to rank highly when people look for a local business like yours.

If you've done a bit of research on your competitors as suggested in the first tip, you already know how many and what sorts of links you need. With that information in hand, try the following

• Request that your site be added to free directories. Free directory links are not worth very much, quite honestly, but in a local search competition they can help. Search Google or Yahoo on the phrase "list of free directories" to get a decent, reasonably-fresh listing of freebie directories, and then begin submitting your site to the directories listed. Also, note that you can pay a directory submission service like DirectoryMaximizer.com to submit your website to around a thousand free directories for about a hundred dollars.
  

• Grab, beg or pay for links from the websites of the local business and community groups you're associated with, including the chamber of commerce, community organizations, the public library, the local newspaper if you advertise there, and so forth. These links, especially when coming from a trustworthy local web site, can help your search engine visibility a lot.
  

• Attempt to duplicate the links that your competitors show. In other words, if your principal competitor in town has purchased some links in paid directories like Yahoo.com or Business.com, do the same thing. If the competitor participates in and gets links from social networking sites like facebook and linkedin, do the same thing. Imitating your competitor will eliminate rather quickly any link advantages he or she possesses.

 Tip #5: Pay Per Click Marketing

Pay Per Click Marketing is a quick and excellent method of gaining new customers.  The term Pay Per Click Marketing refers to advertisements placed on search engine results pages (SERPs)—typically text links that appear atop and/or listed on the right side of the SERPs. Traditionally, these ads consist of a text link to a company’s website or landing page and are often referred to as Sponsored Listings or Pay Per Click (PPC) ads. Pay Per Click Marketing ads appear on SERPs based on the search terms used in a query. To determine which keywords will trigger an ad to appear, marketers bid on keywords used to find their website—the higher the bid, the higher the position an ad gets on the page.

Over time, the definition of Pay Per Click Marketing has evolved into an umbrella term that includes other types of online advertisements—not just Sponsored Listings on SERPs. Contextual advertisements, or online advertisements placed on websites based on the content of a site or page rather than search terms, often fall under the umbrella of Pay Per Click Marketing and can include text, images, audio or video. For the purpose of this paper, we are focusing our discussion on the traditional Pay Per Click Marketing advertising model—ads appearing on SERPs.