The biggest affiliate marketing conference - Affiliate Summit - was held in Las Vegas in February. I’ve attended several Affiliate Summit conferences as an affiliate, but I missed this one.
OrangeSoda had a booth there and we were interviewed. Jon talks about the niche that OrangeSoda fills in the marketplace. Watch the video here:
The Local Search, SEO, and Rants blog by Stephen Espinosa has some helpful tips on how local businesses can get higher in search engines. Yahoo actually indexes the text of local business reviews.
So if you have reviews, there are more ways people could search and have your business show up at the top of the list. This is important for local searches (a local search is when someone searches for a city and/or state along with a phrase, such as “dentist, orem, Utah”). Google pulls reviews from other web sites and takes reviews into account when deciding where to rank sites.
Yahoo Local Business Reviews
Yahoo local business searches actually search the text of reviews. Example: Someone types in the words “cavity, needs filling, Provo UT.” They get back a list of dentists in Provo, Utah. If you’re a dentist that has reviews written about your practice, the chances are better that you’ll show up near the top, if you have some reviews written about your business.
Let’s say someone wrote a review that included the words, I had a cavity that needed filling” and this dentist fit me right in…the words “cavity” and needs “filling” will be bolded and that dentist will probably be at the top of the list.
Google Local Business Reviews
Google takes reviews on other sites for their results. They value reviews. Here’s a trick: Go to Google Maps, and type in your business name. Look for the competitors who rank above you. Click on the reviews tab, see what sources the reviews are coming from (Google pulls reviews from other sites). Other places Google gets reviews are from InsiderPages.com, CitySearch.com, Judysbook.com, and Tripadvisor.com. They get other details (such as details about a business) from a variety of other sites.
Local Business SEO Tip: Ask your clients or customers to write an online review of your business. It’s one of the best tips your customer can give you.
I interviewed one of our PPC account managers, Ryan, about what makes a paid search campaign successful. Here are his answers.
What are the most common misconceptions new PPC clients have?
If a business has never done PPC before, than they may have ROI expectations that are not line for their competitive landscape. It’s important to work with a new client to set realistic goals and timelines for a PPC new campaign.
How long do you need to run a PPC campaign to optimize it effectively?
To optimize a campaign, you need enough conversion data to see trends. Usually, the size of a monthly budget will determine how fast we can gather enough data for optimization purposes. A $20,000 budget generates many more clicks in one month vs. a $500 monthly budget.
What are the main factors that affect the success of a new PPC campaign?
The main factor is clear communication and expectations between client and agency. If both parties are aware of the challenges and work involved to obtain results, than a solid workflow is created that generates results quickly. The remaining factors include linking existing accounts (if available), creating compelling ads, and implementing tracking codes on the website.
What advantages does the OrangeSoda PPC team have over managing a campaign yourself? How about compared to other companies?
Our years of experience. Our core management group has been working with PPC campaigns since 1999, which is a long time with regards to the internet. Also, the OrangeSoda technology enables us to manage both large and small advertisers, and give both groups competitive results.
Describe your ideal PPC client.
I aim for all my clients to be ideal. The most important piece of work I do is making sure they are clear on what results they want to achieve with their advertising. I then give them realistic expectations as to the work involved to reach these results.
How does a larger spend account differ from a smaller spend account?
A larger spend account requires more attention vs. a smaller spend. The amount a client spends, can affect results. This is especially true for competitive verticals like Travel and Retail.
This just in today, from Degreesearch.org:
“We are starting to see an increase in the number of users coming to the site through organic search. Google and MSN are running particularly strong relative to what we have seen in the past. Nice work!”
Chandler Horsley, CEO of Lead Media Partners
On line Degrees - Degreesearch.org
If you’re a new business of any size, that has a web site, your business and marketing plans need to include SEO (search engine optimization). SEOMoz has a great rant about how often startups don’t even mention SEO as part of their strategy.
SEO is how you make sure you’re in search engines and that your site is found for words that relate to your business. Most people find web sites through a search engine, they type in words, usually starting out vague and getting more specific as they go. For any business online optimizing for search engines should be a paramount concern.
But even before that, you’ll want to do some keyword research to see that people are actually searching for or interested in what you plan to sell.
The author, Rand Fishkin, says: most never even examine the possibility that there might already be people searching for the product/service/website you’re creating, and that by getting in front of their eyeballs right when they ask for it, you might have a good chance of succeeding.
What you can learn from keyword research:
When you’re at the top of the list when someone types a term that is related to what you sell, you are getting very targeted traffic - people already interested in what you offer. The results last for years and the ROI for SEO tends to be the highest over other types online marketing.
This is a common question - how do you reconcile the differences in web stats. It seems like every analytics program comes up with a different number, which can be frustrating for businesses of all sizes. It’s also a problem with paid search because the numbers you see from your PPC analytics may not match up with the numbers in Google.
OrangeSoda recently hired Clint Eagar who worked for web analytics firm Omniture. I asked him to write a post to try to demystify the discrepancies that are common between different web analytics tools.
I get a lot of questions about why there is a variance between how different web analytics packages report traffic results.
It’s All About Cookies
This has to do with how an analytics vendor uniquely identifies a visitor. Most analytics providers uniquely identify a visitor by a persistent browser cookie. When a visitor comes to a website the analytics code checks to see if the cookie exists. If the cookie does not exist it attempts to place it.
If it cannot place the cookie many analytics providers will ignore the entire visit. A large portion of the discrepancy between analytics providers comes into play when a web site cannot place this cookie. Some vendors will build a unique visitor cookie by combining user-agent and IP address. Some analytics vendors use third party cookies to uniquely identify visitors while others set a first party cookie and some visitors have their browsers configured to not accept third party cookies.
Establish Analytic Metric Definitions
The next thing you need to understand is how each analytics vendor defines a page views, visits and other metrics. One vendor may define a visit as a user session that lasts for at least one minute. Others will count an additional visit if the visitor views a page and then leaves the page idle for more than thirty minutes.
So, for example, say you’re reading a news story at CNN.com and get about half way through the article then you head out to lunch for thirty minutes and then come back to your open browser, finish the article and then click to read a new article. This will count as two visits – not one. Some analytics vendors will count this as only one visit. How does your provider track a visit?
How is a unique visitor defined? Is it a daily unique visitor (a visitor that is unique to the site today)? Is it weekly (a visitor that is unique to the site this week)? Is it monthly, etc? I think you get my point.
Tracking Code Execution
Other obstacles to having perfect harmony between analytics vendors could be loading time of site and the location of the tracking code JavaScript, does it load before page content or after. Did the visitor close the browser or click back button before the JavaScript had time to execute?
Web Analytics Is About Trends
Trend is king when analyzing web analytics data. More important than squabbling over a ten percent difference in how Google Analytics or Omniture reports a visitor you should instead be questioning: How many visits to do I have this week compared to last? How are different referring domains driving conversions over time?
Ultimately the differences between analytics vendors is just noise and you should never (did I say never?) attempt reconciliation.
Yelp is a great site for local businesses to get feedback and improve search results for their businesses. Most local business don’t realize how powerful online reviews can be. Reputations can be ruined online by a bad review (know RipOffReport?? Just try to get a negative report off your record!). At first you might not think twice about it but a bad online review can be devastating to your small business (see this example).
More people go online to find out about your business instead of looking in the phone book. A negative review could be one of the first search results that come up when someone types in your business name into Google. That’s why SEO for small businesses is wise - it’s a proactive way to manage your reputation on the Internet. You can create links in search results that go to trusted sites that speak well of your business.
Most local review sites don’t give you a chance to respond to a customer complaint. Yelp recently introduced some new tools so you can manage your business profile. You should claim your business at https://biz.yelp.com and then customize it.
Your gut reaction to a negative review can be to retaliate or react in a way that makes you look even worse. Here’s some practical advice to business owners - from Yelp.
This is great advice for blog posts or other forms of negative reviews that can become PR nightmares and catch you off-guard:
comScore and Compete data puts monthly traffic to Yelp at 3.7 million and 9 million unique visitors.
OrangeSoda has a new partner. DoodleKit, is a free website builder that offers small businesses quality web sites that don’t require high tech skills like programming. The free sites are great for hobbies or people who just need a web site. If you want to be found in search engines, their business packages are optimized for online marketing.
Once a web site is built, the next question a business owner usually asks is how to market their web site so they’re found in search engines. I spoke with Heath Huffman, DoodleKit’s Co-founder, about search engine optimization. This is the number one request from their customers - where can they get help with SEO.
Here are some SEO features that DoodleKit offers their business customers to help optimize sites for search engines:
DoodleKit is just a few months old and will continue to integrate good SEO practices into their product.
Most of DoodleKit’s clients ask for additional expertise. That’s where OrangeSoda comes in. We can find the keywords that people are searching for and help your businesses rank higher for those words in search engines.
OrangeSoda also manages paid search campaigns priced for the small business. Google ads help you get immediate traffic to your web site (we also run ads on Yahoo and MSN). Here’s a helpful article on the difference between SEO and PPC.
Here’s the OrangeSoda press release.
Search Engine Land has a monthly column I like to follow called, “Small is Beautiful.” It talks about small businesses and their online marketing successes.
This month there’s an interview with small business owner who is a musician. Musician John W. Tuggle teaches private guitar lessons and tried making an ebook. He only sold about 5 ebooks in over a year - he was discouraged and ready to stop teaching.
He got help with his online marketing and leveraged new media like YouTube, podcasts, blogging, and Skype. Here’s the result of their work: http://www.learningguitarnow.com
Tuggle is doing well by making his local business global. He teaches people all over the world. Small businesses should take note - by thinking bigger.
He teaches more than 40 students, including one in Portugal, and he has 10 students on a waiting list. His podcast has been downloaded about 6,000 times in a few months. YouTube has been a great success - 40,000 views of all his videos in three months and people also buy after seeing the video.
He had a web site but it wasn’t very effective,
“…I focused on looks instead of content. I didn’t know anything about keywords or SEO….the blog, in my mind, had to be an integral part of the site…Everybody is doing blogs now and when I learned how to tag, ping, and bookmark, I got more web site traffic in one day than my other site got in six months. Now that got me excited!”
Here’s the secret too - he creates new products based on research. Not just on his gut feeling on how it will do, but by first looking at the market. Search engine optimization (SEO) is market research - seeing what people are looking for online and creating or spinning your product so it matches what people are searching for.
About his guitar blog:
“I check HitTail and look at the suggestions and what I need help in ranking for. Then I determine what keywords I need to focus on and figure out what I can write about that will interest people, while at the same time help me to get searched or improve rankings.”
His Small Business Online Marketing Tips:
He also promoted his site on Yahoo! Local, Google Maps, and Merchant Circle. Read the entire interview at Search Engine Land.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the options, but hire help and be willing to keep learning and take a step at a time.
After Chris Finken’s post last week about call tracking, I wanted to follow up with a post by Seth Godin about not only tracking but call quality. Godin is one of my favorite marketers - entertaining as well as enlightening. He just posted on how important a phone call is to your business.
More than a call, it’s a chance to build your brand, and learn from a customer. “The most valuable marketing event is almost always an inbound phone call…The customer or prospect is taking the time to call you. She’s focused, interested, paying attention and willing to trust you.”
Normally a phone call and especially an email takes low priority, but as Godin points out, it’s an opportunity. He asks:
He concludes: the goal of every single interaction should be to upgrade the brand’s value in the eye of the caller and to learn something about how to do better, not to get the caller to just go away.
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