1. Build a Quality Website, Use WordPress

The best place to start is to launch a website for your business, but not just any website. Create one that is clean, easy to navigate, has good content, and is optimized for search engines to crawl and rank – WordPress is a great place to start. Use SEO best practices like continually writing fresh content that incorporates your most relevant keywords. Use the power of blogging to help in your SEO strategy. Google likes social media content.

2. Drive Unpaid Traffic to Your Website

Drive organic traffic to your website by blogging regularly about information related to your services, but that is helpful in nature from your audience’s perspective. Don’t use this medium to directly sell. If visitors to your site like what they are reading, they are very likely to share it with others through email, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. They may even re-blog your post with links back to your website. Another way to drive traffic is to write content for other websites as a guest or regular writer. These engagements typically allow for a link back to your website in your byline. Also, contribute to conversations within forums like Yahoo! Answer or LinkedIn Groups.

3. Get Social With Social Media

One of the best way to reach targeted audiences for your narrow range of services is through social media. Many people use the Internet to search for services, many long before they actually plan to render them. Social media can act as an influencer, used in the awareness and consideration stages of the typical decision making process.

Create a company page on Facebook and LinkedIn, and promote it to your customers and to any permission-based email lists you have in place. Regularly update the content on these pages and directly interact with your prospective customers. Listen to their queries and satisfy them with your expert answers.

4. Focus on High Impact Keywords

Use Google Insights for Search to identify high impact keywords related to your business, then develop content incorporating these words on your website and blog. Tweet information, trends and tips related to these keywords and also test Google Adwords to drive paid search traffic.

Google Insight for Search screenshot.

5. Become a Thought Leader

Operating a small business with a limited marketing budget means focusing more of your energy on developing your reputation as an industry expert and thought leader. Offer advise online through articles and webinars. Offer a feedback loop for website visitors to give you an opportunity to answer their questions. And consider sometimes getting out of the digital world and into the real one by speaking on expert panels.

Notice that GA shows you lots of data but it does not tell you what to do with this information or how to use it. It’s just stats. What you do with this data is up to you. Here are some ways to use your Google Analytics data to help you increase website traffic and conversions.

1. Adjust and Test Your Site Structure

As the famous quote goes, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” So, if something about your website isn’t really working for you, use your Google Analytics data to make a positive change. For example, let’s say you have a website that sells seasonal items like Halloween costumes. Your Google Analytics data shows a very short Average Time on Site stat for your Group Halloween Costumes landing page, but a longer average time being spent on your regular Halloween Costumes landing page. You may conclude your site visitors are not interested in group Halloween costumes. Or, it could be the landing page itself isn’t optimized for higher engagement. With this in my mind, you can begin testing elements of your page to see if it can drive more visitor time spent on the page:

Layout – Compare the two landing pages. Does your Group Halloween Costumes page organize the graphic elements and content differently? How about the colours used? Use Google Website Optimizer to run A/B tests of your landing page to see which combination of elements drives the desired outcome.

Add a Prominent Feedback Vehicle – Is the quantitative data still not giving you enough to work with? Add a Comments field to collect qualitative insight from your visitors about what they like or don’t like about your website and/or offerings.

Improve Navigation and Linking – Use the data to identify the most popular pages on your site, then ensure your main navigation, home page and inside pages link visitors quickly to those pages. Map the customer journey through your website and identify holes where visitors can fall out of the journey without buying or giving your their contact information.

2. Adjust and Test Your Content

In the Visitors section on the left side of the dashboard, you can review Visits, Pageviews and Average Pageviews. If there is one page that has far more visits than any other page on your website, try these tactics:

Expand the Page – Turn your most popular page into a larger section of your website. The content of that page can be used to leverage more pageviews throughout the site by adding more related but deeper seeded pages, and links to other parts of the website.

Improve Poorly Performing Pages – From your GA data, you may determine that some pages should just be killed, while others you believe should perform much better than they are. This is a great opportunity to review the content of your page to ensure it is using SEO best practices. Are you incorporating the right keywords that will help online users to find you? Are you using the data from your Adwords PPC campaign to guide you on what phrases are converting well to use in your SEO? Improving your on-page SEO can have a dramatic impact on performance.

Consider Multimedia – Pages with multimedia content like videos, infographics or interactive content can drive higher visitor engagement. They can also be used as assets to obtain customer contact information you can use for lead nurturing. For example, site vistors to your Halloween Costumes landing page are greeted with a teaser video that shows them how to make a Superman costume with household materials. From there, you offer site visitors the opportunity to sign up and receive instructional videos on how to make ten other superhero costumes.

3. Track Conversion Through Goals

To increase your site conversions, use Google Analytics’ Goals feature. A Goal is basically a very important Pageview you wish to measure that marks the end of a conversion. For example, a “Thank You” page visitors see after making an online purchase. Or, the “Confirmation” page they see after submitting their contact information through your online form. To create a Goal is simple. Under the Goals section, click Add Goal. Then, simply paste the goal URL (pageview to measure) into the field – i.e. myholidaywebsite.com/thankyou.html. Once completed, GA will then start tracking the number of site visitors that reach that page or complete a Goal. You can also track the steps (or path) that the visitor took to get to the Goal. This can help you identify a successful customer journey to replicate for other Goals you add.

Guest Author – Mitch O’Conner is an online marketer who specializes in site planning and content creation. When he’s not busy building new websites, he enjoys spending time with his family, working out and watching movies.

Search Engine Journal reports that more than 70 percent of online consumers start searching for a product through search engines. As a small business driving sales, you need to employ a strategy to show up in these search results.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can generate thousands of sales leads for your business at no monetary cost. When properly used, it increases your organic search ranking so that you are found by a larger number of prospective customers. It also levels the playing field as you compete with larger corporations spending gobs of money on advertising to attract the same customer. Click thrus on organic search results are at least eight times higher than a pay-per-click (PPC) ad. So, here are six simple steps to help you start optimizing your small business website for SEO:

Step 1: Select Your Keywords Carefully

Search for keywords that are relevant to your business. Your keywords should depict the image of your products or services. You can go for ideal or exact keywords for your small business products, but keep in mind they can be more difficult to rank high for due to increased competition. A good idea is to go for keywords or phrases (also referred to as “longtail” terms) that are unique and highly targeted, but generate less competition and volume. The more longtail terms your can quickly rank high for, the more volume of qualified traffic you’ll generate from those collective terms.

Step 2: Optimize Your Content

Regularly optimize the content of your website by focusing on these four basic principles:

• Onsite optimization
• Social media
• Local search
• Link building

Make sure you have the ability to modify content on your website directly. This will allow you to add content focused around the keywords your are targeting to attract new visitors to your website organically. Also, add your primary and secondary keywords for your small business on the homepage title and meta tags.

Step 3: Generate Inbound Links

By asking other trusted websites to feature the information of your business or just by writing great content that others want to refer to, you can increase the ranking of your business. You can also enlist your business in paid and unpaid directories to earn inbound links. But, ensure the sites you are creating linking relationships with are highly relevant to your website. Also, refrain from engaging in blackhat SEO practices such as “paying” for links on other websites. This is frowned upon by Google and can cause your website to be blacklisted and not appear in any search results.

Step 4: Mark Your Presence on Local Sites Too

Small businesses can take advantage of sites who display lists of small businesses for free. Get yourself registered at sites such as Google, Yahoo and Bing local sites. Many of these listings include a location map of your business along with contact and product information. These type of listings help you get in front of local users searching for similar products as yours.

Step 5: Get Active on Social Media

A good way to increase SEO for your business is to interact on social media. Engage directly with customers through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. Search engines like high ranking content on social media platforms, so get active and get found. Social media can be fun, but also very strategic to your business when used with a purpose.

Step 6: Evaluate Your Ranking

The most important step is to evaluate your SEO strategy by measuring your search engine results pages (SERPs). Measure ranking, resulting traffic, and conversion to leads. You may discover that a certain keyword may be popular in driving volume but not conversion. If so, it’s better for you to focus your efforts on driving less overall traffic, but more from high conversion keywords.

It’s difficult not to succumb to the allure of that picture in your head of instant success, raving fans and high returns when launching your small business. Yet for most, success is elusive and requires time, patience, resilience, and often several failures before being achieved. One way to accelerate your path to success is by adopting an aggressive web marketing strategy.

An integrated web marketing strategy is a fundamental building block for small businesses. The reason is simple. The masses are making online and offline purchasing decisions by investigating on the web. Crowd sourcing websites like Tripadvisor and Yelp carry heavy influence because they allow the general public to rate and review services. Online users trust these reviews, more so than “professional” critics. They also trust the organic search results in Google, mainly the top five listings that show up at the top of page 1. And they pay very close attention to what their friends are liking or commenting about on Facebook. Whether you like it or not, you need to be in these places to grow your small business. You can start by focusing your web marketing efforts and resources through these three activities:

• Blogging to inform, educate and share in a personable, authentic manner
• Social Media to connect and cultivate a community
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to show up at the top of search results

Blogging

A blog attracts potential customers to your website only if what you write about is worth reading – that’s the key. If you are simply using it to sell or promote your wares, then don’t bother wasting your time blogging because nobody cares. Online users are savvy and prone to clicking away. They are far more likely to stop to read an article that helps them improve their health or run their business better, rather then a promotion for vitamins or consulting services. When blogging, you need to give knowledge to earn engagement. And if you do this well and consistently, you will build an audience that will talk about you to others. A blog should also serve as the “hub” of your social marketing, using Twitter, Facebook and other forums to push the content out from your blog, and to drive traffic back to it.

Social Media

Like blogging, social media is only as good as the knowledge you share. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are powerful mediums for finding and connecting with like-minded people who share the same passions and interests. But just like inviting a group of friends over for an informal dinner, only to use the gathering to sell them on some multi-level marketing household goods, using social media to self-promote is a giant turn off. Treat your fans and followers as friends. Engage, share, learn, and inform. If your passion is cooking and you run a restaurant, post some of your recipes to your Facebook page (while encouraging fans to do the same); tweet out innovative cooking techniques you find online; write reviews of restaurants or cooking books on your blog; and always invite comments, ideas and feedback from your audience. Social media is a conversation, not a pitch.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

A recent study by Slingshot SEO showed that the click-through rate for a website in the number 1 organic spot on Google is 18 percent, with second position at 10 percent, third at 7 percent, and so on. The number 1 spot gets more clicks than 2 and 3 combined! That’s really hard to ignore, so don’t. SEO is very important to a successful online marketing strategy. So how do you start? There are SEO best practices you can implement yourself, some of which you can find on this blog as a starting point. Over time, however, it’s worthwhile to outsource this ongoing activity to an SEO expert who can stay up on the changes to Google’s ranking algorithm.

According to 815imedia.com, “31 percent of all business buyers first use a search engine when looking for something local, and 90 percent of purchases are made within 50 miles of a person’s home.” To make sure that your company is not missing out on these large amounts of customers, there are several local mediums you can use when trying to “get local” with your marketing:

Google AdWords
This is obvious choice for most businesses when it comes to marketing their company because this is where most prospects begin their research into the product or service you offer. Setting up a local Google AdWords program  takes just a few easy steps:

1. Go to the Google home page and click on “Advertising Programs”
2. Click on AdWords
3. Create a Google Account
4. Go to “How it Works” and click on “For Local Businesses”

Other Search Engines
Google is not the only search engine around. Consider Bing. Although it doesn’t carry nearly the same search volume as Google, it’s less expensive for advertising. And while local search engines, such as CitySearch are not as popular, you can usually get your company to show up at the top faster through your SEO efforts.

City or Town Websites
Just about every city and town has a website. The easiest way to get involved is to call or email the editor of the website and ask to place a text or banner ad, or a short description of your company on the website or newsletter. Normally, the website will have a contact link that will send you to the right place.

City or Town Media
Reach out to a local community newspapers and give them a reason to cover you. This is where a good public relations strategy comes into play. Local publications like to focus on local people and businesses in the community. If you’re a nutritionist, why not position yourself as the local expert in nutrition? You can do this by offering to write informative and helpful articles on the subject matter without trying to pitch your business. If the publication chooses to carry your articles, they will give you a byline where you can point readers to your website address or blog where they can find more helpful advice. This strategy serves two purposes: creates trust in your brand amongst readers and drives additional traffic to your website. The additional traffic can also positively impact your search rankings.

Guest Author – Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to document scanning. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including document software to small businesses and entrepreneurs at Resource Nation.

My team at PEER 1 Hosting obsesses over how to accurately track all of our sales leads back to it’s original source, and have that data automatically populated in our CRM system Salesforce.com. Sources meaning Pay-per-click (PPC), banner ads, organic keywords (SEO), live chat, and phone call. As a marketer, you know how invaluable this data is for optimizing your efforts and spend. And as a web programmer or analyst, you know how difficult this is to accomplish.

Enter in Ramon Vawda, my developer guru. He’s uncovered an 8 step methodology to setting up and tracking keywords back to multiple sources in Salesforce. Ryan Kelly covered this in detail in an article on Unbounce. He writes:

The holy grail for most marketers I talk to is being able to track a lead – or even a sale – all the way back to the original source keyword. If the marketer knew that, he or she could easily begin to understand what to focus on in terms of keyword targets for organic or paid search.

Are you running a bloated PPC campaign with dozens of ad groups, and hundreds or even thousands of keywords, not knowing which keyword drove the conversion, lead, or months later, the sale?

Are you using and paying for Salesforce, but have not taken the time to properly pipe in your AdWords or Google Analytics data?

Sounds like a no-brainer, but trust me – there are lots of companies out there with revenues in the tens of millions, or hundreds of millions, who are not doing this right.

Their PPC budgets are way into the six figures per month, and the license fees for Salesforce could probably pay for two or three employees in my company.

The article gets into some detail, but trust me, it’s worth knowing or passing on to your web developer.

Google search engine advertising is a direct response form of advertising–you’re reaching a potential customer at the moment they are very interested in your product or ready to buy–versus a brand awareness medium like display (banner) advertising that builds preference over time. For that reason, it’s far more critical that your PPC landing page converts that motivated buyer into a captured qualified lead, often and fast. The only way to know if you’re yielding outstanding landing page performance is through testing.

A/B Testing is a highly effective form of testing landing pages for optimization. It’s easy too. Start by taking an existing landing page or design a new one, decide what component you want to test–for example, headline and copy–create a separate version, and run them against one another. A fantastic tool that I use for running landing page A/B tests is called Visual Website Optimizer. It’s simple to implement, highly intuitive and very affordable.

A typical A/B test using Visual Website Optimizer would be to have a Control landing page (existing version) versus a Variant landing page (new version). Visitor traffic to your landing page is then split in real-time 50/50 without the website visitor knowing it. For them, it’s a seamless experience. For you, it’s an automated process provided by the tool that begins giving you real-time data. Run it for some time, typically 4 weeks, and you’ll begin seeing if the Variant is outperforming the Control, by how much, and a prediction of how likely it will be pronounced the winner.

Incremental improvements to your landing pages can have a significant impact on the volume of leads you generate. Testing copy, graphics, colour, and page layout can each have an impact on your landing pages ability to convert better. Some tests may prove inconclusive, and that’s perfectly fine. But, only through continuous testing will you find improvements ranging from the marginal to dramatic. Testing also provides you with great insight on what your online visitors respond to, which can be further reflected in other areas of your marketing.

Search advertising has matured rapidly in the past 10 years. What was once a plug and gun solution for making money has become a science. To maximize revenues and ultimately profits, search marketers must understand quality scores, bid optimizations and conversion tracking. These tools can take some time to learn so for small businesses, social media PPC may bridge the gaps in your online adverting endeavors.

Social media search is a simple, but fairly robust solution for branded and service-based businesses to advertise. According to eMarketer, 52% of companies worldwide claim social media has had a “moderate” or “huge” impact on their search engine marketing programs within the last year.

Simple Social Media PPC
Social media PPC advertising is different than search because instead of bidding on quantitative measures and keyword sets, with search, your ad price is determined by the industry and size of the demographic you are targeting. Social media advertising poses new unique ways to target and segment your audience. Some marketers argue that search PPC is more targeted than social media PPC, however that opinion seems to be dwindling, according to Bia Kelsey, “Social media revenues are forecasted to reach $8.3 billion in 2015, from an estimated $2.1 billion in 2010—a compound annual growth rate of 31.6%.” Much of this growth will be attributed to Facebook’s ad platform maturing. Facebook is forecast to account for 21.6% of all US display (or banner) advertising dollars in 2011. They have recently made a number of key additions that make he site a compelling place to make purchases as well as interact.

Facebook recently announced the ability to integrate ecommerce stores within a company’s Facebook Page. This is potentially huge news for small businesses, because they are able to redirect their paid ads to a Facebook landing page, likely decreasing bounce rates. People don’t want to click on an ad in Facebook and be redirected to an e-commerce store yet–they want to stay within the site.

As social media networks mature, it will undoubtedly foster a lucrative platform for paid advertising. People will begin integrate a buying process mindset with their social activities. This is all it will take for marketers, and it’s likely that anybody currently in the social networking space is primed to grow with the advertising platform.

Image Credit: Flickr

Guest Author – Matt Krautstrunk is an expert writer on telemarketing services based in San Diego, California. He writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs such as b2b telemarketing at Resource Nation.

• “Search engine optimization is long term strategy.”
• “Social media is a long term strategy.”
• “SEO is dead.”
• “Content is king.”
• “Paid Search is the safest way to achieve ROI.”
• “Social drives brand awareness not conversions.”

Truth is, some platforms work better alone, while other businesses are able to leverage a combination of all three. For instance, paid search may not work well for a T-shirt brand but may work wonders for a lead generation company. Added to the fact that online marketing success is all relative to how you measure success (or conversions), it can get confusing really fast.

Many small business owners have changed the way they view a success. Social media marketing has came on strong in the past couple of years and marketers are beginning to measure successful conversions in terms of engagement rather than purchase decisions.

With this approach, they are able shape their strategy to create long term relationships with customers rather than viewing them as one-and-done. According to eMarketer, “as of March 2011, 44% of respondents to the survey used social media for marketing, vs. 28% who used SEO and 21% who used paid search.” This statistic can be taken with a grain of salt because it is likely attributed to the fact that social media is a friendly, low barrier to entry marketing solution for small businesses.

Many businesses try social media and realize that it is easy to do and hard to do well; they are taking an advertising approach rather than engagement strategy. This is why many small businesses plan to invest in social media for the future. According to the same eMarketer study, 44% of small businesses currently use social media and 29% plan to add to their social media marketing tactics in the future. The growth in social media as an ad platform has made it an attractive solution for fostering engagement, where a smaller amount of SMB’s are investing in SEO and paid search, 22% and 16% respectively.

While we know where the majority of businesses are putting their advertising dollars in 2011, each industry differs in effectiveness. 57.2% of small business respondents told Ad-ology that social media was at least somewhat useful at generating leads. The MerchantCircle survey found local small businesses were more likely to say search engine marketing was an effective channel than social networks, at 40.2% vs. 36.7%.

Social media may be easier to adopt initially for most businesses, but alone it will likely not be as effective as when it is incorporated equally in the online marketing mix. To ramp up your media marketing efforts make sure your business is equally investing strategies in paid search, SEO and social media in conjunction with your website.

Guest Author – Matt Krautstrunk is an expert writer on credit card processing based in San Diego, California. He writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs such as business phone systems at Resource Nation.

Learn Basic SEO
SEO or search engine optimization, is the process of utilizing search engine specific keywords to improve the visibility of your website, links or blog. Many larger, well-endowed companies hire a particular company or contract out specialists to do more advanced SEO work, but you can at least learn the basics to get your campaign off the ground. There are a number of online resources for this, but in general, try to include keywords in your blog titles, the content of your post/website, and between HTML tags (for example, if you have a dog-sitting business, try to include the phrase “dog-sitting” often in your content.) Also, include keywords in meta-tags.

Paid Search
Google Adwords is the biggest sponsored search program. How does it work? Bid on an appropriate keyword for your business and pay a price for a click. The price for clicks vary, but the program is manageable and easy on your budget. The best part is you can set a daily budget for this in order to limit your overall costs.

Utilize Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing may seem overrated, but it is a very useful tool for inexpensive marketing. Popular sites like Twitter and Facebook make it easy for companies to connect with customers, provided you promote your product in a genuine — not spammy — kind of way. Create a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account and link them back to all of your blogs and websites. Promote a campaign where people that “like” your page are automatically entered into a promotional giveaway or sales deal. Make sure you interact with your customers on a daily basis – to take care of complaints as well as receive compliments — in public!

Viral Video
Years ago, it might have cost $20,000 to produce a high quality video and pay for its distribution. Now, all it takes is a little creativity, maybe some volunteer actors, some decent video equipment, some interesting narration, a little luck, and voila! Instant viral video.

Source

Shop Around For Web Design
If you want to draw traffic to your website, its design is of paramount importance — barely functioning sites won’t give you repeat visitors/customers, so don’t skimp on this if you can. If you want to go the DIY route, try using a free content management system (CMS) like Joomla or WordPress that will help you give your site a professional polish. To be safe, however, you might want to shop around for a designer (or design team) that provides quality work for a reasonable price — it’s worth it.

Use An Analytics Tool
The best way to measure your return on investment (ROI) when it comes to online marketing is to use a tool like Google Analytics. It’ll allow you to view and analyze traffic data for your website, and tell you who’s using your site, why, at what times, and where they’re coming from. It’s a worthwhile investment of your time if you want to make sure your online marketing dollars are being well-spent – and it’s absolutely free!

Source

Guest Author – Jason Robbins is a freelance writer who specializes in personal credit. Robbins has written various pieces about credit repair services and what to look for when checking out credit repair companies.