Archive for: February 2010

Today, a corporate web site is one of the most important marketing tools a small business has; and for many it is just as essential as having a phone number or business cards. Typically, companies rely on a variety of marketing “assets” like e-mailing lists, customer databases, and marketing materials to help them promote and build their businesses. But of all the marketing assets a business may have, its web site can be the strongest marketing asset of all, especially when it is part of a strategic, coordinated marketing plan.

A web site often includes the elements found in a marketing plan; from lead generation to advertising to online payments to customer service. With Web 2.0 interactivity now commonplace, companies can also add video, news feeds, online tutorials, and social networking integration to their web sites to further extend the site’s capability and meet their customers’ ever-changing needs and expectations.

An Online Advantage

Here are 7 reasons your web site could (or should!) be the strongest marketing asset available to your small business today:

1. Everything is in one place – web forms for lead capture, company videos, industry news feeds, links to resources and partners, online tutorials, customer service, events calendar, photo gallery, testimonials, marketing materials, etc., can all be included on your web site.
2. Integrates with other marketing – direct mail campaigns can reference online coupons or downloads on your site, email campaigns can lead to targeted landing pages, opt-in subscriptions can help build marketing email lists, social networking strategies can be integrated with the web site, etc.
3. Builds credibility with users – an outdated, unattractive web site sends all the wrong messages to your visitors, but an updated, user-friendly web site is an asset that and can instantly make you more credible and trustworthy, regardless of the size of your business.
4. Results can be tracked and measured – by using web analytics tools, you can track visitors, conversions, search engine terms and keywords, entry and exit pages, traffic stats, and a multitude of additional information.
5. Information can be changed and updated – unlike printed materials where you have to order hundreds (or thousands) of brochures or postcards that may quickly become outdated, your web site can be changed whenever information changes.
6. Local reach, global reach – and everything in-between. Depending on how you optimize and promote your site, you can target customers regardless of geographic location.
7. Works for you 24/7 – your site is available for visitors to do research or purchase products and services at their own convenience, at any time, regardless of your business hours.

Show It Off!

If you are not currently using your web site as a marketing asset for your business, here are some tips to help you combine your site with your overall marketing strategy:

• Showcase your advertising and marketing online; e.g., re-use commercials, radio spots, print advertisements, coupons, flyers, etc., on your web site to extend their reach beyond initial audiences, and also stretch your investment at the same time.
• Include your web address on everything – advertisements, business cards, vehicle lettering, name badges, logos, printed materials, etc., to drive traffic to your web site and help build your brand.
• Update your web site on a regular basis – do something at least monthly to update the information, add new content, improve search engine positions, promote the site, build inbound links, etc. A stale, outdated site is not useful to your visitors, and is not much of an asset to your business, either.
• Take it seriously! Consumers today are already online, and every touch point where you intersect with your customers and potential customers should ultimately lead them back to a great user experience on your web site!

When consumers today search online for the products and services your business offers, you are not only competing with other web sites, you’re also competing with social networking profiles, online videos, blog posts, Twitter tweets, photo sharing sites, online news outlets, etc., all blended together on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

So how can your business optimize for all these different types of media now being included in the search results? By getting vertical.

Getting vertical is simply another way to think about your search engine strategy. Yes, you still need to effectively optimize your web site to do well in the search results. But in addition to that, you now must also optimize for the search “verticals” that contribute to blended search results as well.

For instance, Google determines its blended results (in part) by analyzing what ranks well in its search verticals, including image search, Google News, video search, and social networking information from Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed. That’s a lot of verticals to consider! But optimizing for blended search means that you need to have at least some sort of presence on these verticals to get Google’s attention and boost your position in the search rankings.

Social Networks

Since the major search engines now include real-time information from popular social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube, your search engine rankings can definitely benefit from implementing a social networking strategy. By participating on social networking sites, you contribute a constant stream of fresh information that not only benefits your customers and followers, but also helps get (and keep) the attention of the search engines as they gather new information from these real-time sources.

The key to being successful on the social networks, however, is to implement an integrated strategy that combines all of your social marketing efforts together with your web site and with the other marketing activities you may already have established. (See our web site or blog posts on Integrated Social Marketing (ISM)® for more details on this concept).

Online Videos

Videos can be optimized for blended search, whether on a web site, in a blog post, on a social networking site, or uploaded to a video sharing site like YouTube. In fact, video sharing sites already have built-in features that make it easy for users to share videos with friends and followers. They also allow viewers to leave comments or forward video links to their lists of contacts.

When using videos in your search strategy, be sure to add relevant descriptions and title tags to your videos, and rename the video files to include your targeted keywords in the filename for an added boost. Re-use your videos in as many places on the web as you can, including embedding them in your web pages and integrating them with your Google Place pages to help build authority for the videos as well.

News Content

Another source of blended search results comes from content found in online news from mainstream media outlets, in Google News, and on a variety of online newswire services. One way for small businesses to get online news coverage is to submit press releases to online media outlets, both paid and free, as a way to build quality inbound links and get additional exposure online. You should also try to include video and images in your press releases whenever possible. Multi-media content tends to do well – especially in Google News – and it provides additional press release content that can be indexed in the search databases.

Images and Photos

There are several ways that you can use images to contribute to your results in blended search. First, your images and photos should have keyword-rich file names, such as “keyword.jpg” or “my_company_at_eventname.jpg” whenever possible. Also, be sure to use keywords in your HTML image alt tags and in the descriptions and captions of the photos as well. Then, you can share these photos on your web site, on your blog, on your Facebook page (and other social profiles), and upload them to photo sharing sites like Flickr. Encourage your visitors to leave comments, and also leave your own comments, since this type of participation will also help provide fresh content and gain attention from the search engines as they gather real-time search information as well.

Think Vertical

So if you are serious about improving your business’ positions in the search engine rankings, you will need to expand the way you think about optimizing your entire search profile online. The more you can do to optimize the search “verticals” (like social networking, video, images, etc.), the more influence you will have over what the search engines know about your business and its relevance to searchers today. Thinking vertical can help you stay competitive now that blended search means competing with more than just other web sites.

We are often asked how long it will take before an optimized web site will start showing up in the search engine results, but of course that’s a difficult question with a complicated answer. Seeing results in the search engines depends on many factors, and each web site’s circumstances are unique. However, here are some points to consider in determining how quickly your site will start showing results in the search engines:

• How many inbound links does your site have? Google definitely cares about not only how many inbound links your site has, but also the quality of the sites those links come from. For instance, inbound links from an authority site with a topic related to yours will benefit you way more than reciprocal links or links from a site that is unrelated (or worse – a link farm). And paid links are a big no-no altogether.
• How old is your web site? Believe it or not, the age of your web site matters to the search engines. New sites come and go all the time, and the search engines want to make sure that your site is established and stable before they rank it in their results. However, a new site with lots of inbound links will quickly get the attention of the search engines, since they assume that if others think your site is worth linking to, then it must be valuable.
• How “fresh” is your content? A static site that never gets updated is not all that interesting to the search engines, no matter how great the content may be. The search engines want to provide their users with sites that are well-maintained and contain up-to-date information. Since there are so many sites to choose from, the search engines will choose the ones that have the latest information.
• How many inbound links do your competitors have? If the top-ranking web sites have 10,000 inbound links and your site has only a few, you have some work to do. You may not need to have exactly the same number of inbound links as the top sites, but you definitely need to be close. And of course, having more is even better.
• How competitive is the keyword you are targeting? This is a tough one, because the more competitive your keyword is, the more sites will be trying to rank for that same keyword. If your keywords are highly competitive, you may want to do some research and optimize for similar but less-competitive variations, at least to start with. Then as you build additional inbound links and add fresh content to your site, you can add back the competitive keywords.
• How visible is your business online – overall? Do you have an existing social media marketing strategy in place? Does your company have a blog? Send e-newsletters? Submit online press releases? Syndicate articles? All of these things can contribute to your online visibility, and will help you naturally build inbound links as people discover your content and start linking to it. Plus, the more places your business shows up online, the more opportunities the search engines have to find you.

Getting good rankings in the search engines doesn’t stop after the optimization work is completed, that’s really just the beginning. You must consistently add fresh content to your site and build as many quality inbound links as possible so the search engines will notice your site. There are no specific timeframes to determine how long it will take to see results; however, the more you can do to show the search engines that your site is a valuable resource, the faster they will share that with their users.