Here are our handy tips to make sure you’re getting the best out of your online advertising efforts:

Negative Keywords

A negative keyword is a word or term that you don’t want your ads to show for. For example, if you offered IT servicing in Hampshire, you might not want your adverts to run when someone types ‘IT servicing Leeds’. So you can add the word ‘Leeds’ to your negative keyword list. This has the benefit of removing low quality clicks, but it also helps improve your click through rate (CTR) since your advert will be more targetted.

There are many ways you can come up with a list of negative keywords:

Brainstorm: Start making a list of all the terms you don’t want to show for.

Analytics: Look at the ‘Matched search queries’ report – are there particular search terms that are giving you a high bounce rate. These might be terms that you want to avoid in future.

AdWords: Look at the ‘All search terms’ report, to see what searches have resulted in a click on your ad. There may be searches here that you know instantly are irrelevant.

Landing Pages

You should make sure you’re sending searchers to the most relevant page possible. The best way to do this is to create targetted landing pages for each AdGroup/product/service. Not only will this provide the searcher with what they’re looking for in terms of content, but you can also use this page to help improve conversions. Getting visitors to do what you want them to do with carefully crafted call to actions.

Testing

The Japanese have a philosphy called Kaizan. It stands for continuous improvement. This is something that should be applied to your Google AdWord and other PPC campaigns. You must always work to improve your performance. There’s so many things you should be testing:

• Landing pages
• Adverts
• Keywords
• Phrase/broad/exact match keywords
• Minimum bids
• The time of day you deliver your ads

Testing is a never ending process and will help improve your campaign continually.

Many people assume that they can set up their Google AdWord account and just let it run without any proactive management. Yes you only pay for the clicks you get – but you need to make sure those clicks are high quality clicks. Additionally, the better managed your campaigns, the less you pay for those clicks.

If you need help setting up or managing your Google AdWord campaign, talk to us. We manage campaigns with budgets from £150 a month all the way up to £50,000 a month and love helping our clients get the results they want.

How can you justify spending money on marketing your business online, when you’ve never really spent much marketing it offline? If you’re not used to spending money on marketing at all, making the switch to spending on SEO is no mean feat. So here are a few tips to help you stay afloat:

Do it right or not at all

If you’re going to commit to SEO, then make sure that you do it properly. Find an SEO advisor or company that you trust – ask for referrals and make sure they only apply ethical (white hat) SEO principles to your campaign. Once you’ve found them, listen to them and trust them.

SEO expenditure is never normally cheap (and if it is, then it should raise alarm bells). But going from zero to something is never an easy process. If you don’t think you can commit wholeheartedly to the SEO campaign, then maybe you should consider forgetting about SEO for now.

Start other marketing campaigns (even just tiny little ones)

Everything in business (and especially marketing) is so closely linked, that starting other marketing activities can help bolster your SEO campaign without much effort. For example, if you’re not already doing any social media marketing, then think about signing up to Twitter. It doesn’t take (or cost) much to get started, and with a little bit of daily effort, you can start seeing some great results. All these new Twitter followers, visits to your site from Twitter etc, all help with the SEO effort. Google have been very vocal in their desire for companies to start engaging with their audience more and Twitter is a fantastic way to do it.

You could also start creating a new monthly eNewsletter that goes out to your customer based (possibly offering them an incentive for referring their friends and family). You could sponsor some local events to help promote your name in the local community or provide your goods or services for free to a local charity. All these marketing efforts make a big huge if you’ve never carried out any real marketing before. Any new customers gained from these activities can help fund your SEO efforts.

Have decent expectations

It’s natural to be a bit aprehensive when starting a new SEO campaign; you’re spending money on an area you’ve never spent on before. But do try to remain calm and not panic! SEO takes time and should be employed as a long term marketing strategy. It’s unlikely that you’ll see results overnight (and again, if you did it should raise warning flags!). Have faith in the SEO partner you found and trust that they want this campaign to work as much as you do.

Even a small web presence can make a huge impact. It’s important that you’re gaining new business from a range of sources. It’s never a good idea to keep all your eggs in one basket. So start online marketing, continue to push your referrals and start thinking about other avenues you can explore. It’ll all help your business grow and succeed.

Have you just started on your SEO journey? How are you finding it? Let us know in the comments below.

This rolls out completely at the end of the month, but you can activate it now if you want. The  new Timeline feature applies to all facebook pages including local businesses, national companies, products, brands, public figures, causes, and communities. We suggest to start amending your page now so that you have it looking just right for when the March 30th switchover takes place.

If you need any help, Facebook has created a help page explaining this new Timeline feature for businesses and responding to some common questions and concerns people have about the new style: https://www.facebook.com/about/pages/.

Do you have a Facebook page which needs redesigning to fit this new style? Or have you been thinking about joining the social revolution and creating your own Facebook business page for the first time? We can help…GET IN TOUCH TODAY!!

With the dawn of a new year, businesses are reevaluating their marketing priorities in an attempt to put themselves on track for a profitable year. With our knowledge and experience, we at SMEketing can help you develop an online digital marketing plan to help your company thrive in 2012.

Unlike in the past, online marketing has become one of the primary ways in which companies reach potential customers. In a recent study published by the Pew Foundation, it was found that 96 percent of young adults and 87 percent of older adults use search engines to find out information about products and services. Additionally, search engine use behaviour indicates that users tend to only follow links to sites listed on the first page of search results. Social media has also taken on a whole life of its own, with 78 to 84 percent of users depending on social media to research products, according to Digby. Both of these trends point to the importance of using digital marketing services as a means to attract and interact with potential customers to increase sales.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, has long been one of the primary methods used to improve search engine ranking to increase website traffic. Our view at SMEketing is that ultimately, high levels of website traffic translate into increased opportunities for sales. SEO efforts can include the use of keywords in website structure, high quality content that naturally integrates targeted and long string keyword phrases and article marketing, just to name a few methods used.

Often, website structure is overlooked by business owners as a method to improve search engine ranking. However, if keywords are integrated into page titles and in website names, it increases the opportunities for users to find the website.

There is a saying among internet marketers – “Content is King” – and it is definitely true. Quality content includes blogs, product descriptions and overall content that is keyword rich and delivers valuable information to readers. It is recommended that almost all businesses have a blog as part of their website. Blog content can include helpful information about products, background information and profiles of key employees, industry information and general information that customers might find interesting.

Article marketing can also be an especially helpful and effective method of search engine optimisation. Quality articles are written that contain targeted and long string keyword phrases and links to your website. Additionally, when they are submitted to high quality article directories, company information is included with the article. The value of article marketing is multilayered. High quality content articles establish you as an authority and expert in your field and industry. They also provide high quality backlinks to your website. Finally, they provide a means for interested readers to go to your website, increasing website traffic and sales.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is an amazing phenomenon that has grown by leaps and bounds just in the past several years. With such high numbers of people using social media as a resource for product information, it is smart business to concentrate marketing efforts using this medium.

Social media can be used for many different goals. It is a wonderful way to increase quality backlinks and website traffic with a minimum amount of effort. With a single posting, you can literally create hundreds, if not thousands, of backlinks when the message goes out to your followers. If those followers find the message valuable, they will re-post it to their own network of followers, creating yet another wave of backlinks and website traffic.

Social media posts can be used to announce sales, introduce new products and create a positive reputation online for you and your company. In recent reports, users have indicated that they often turn to online recommendations or recommendations from friends when making purchase decisions. As a result, conducting a positive online PR campaign can reap tremendous benefits.

The value and importance of online marketing cannot be underscored enough in today’s digital atmosphere. If you are looking for experience and knowledge for digital marketing services for your company, please contact us at SMEketing. Offering premier internet marketing in Hampshire, we will provide you with an honest analysis of your current online marketing efforts and make recommendations to improve your online presence and search engine ranking.

So, along with getting healthy, drinking less, exercising more and vowing to do a number of other activities in 2012, think about making some of these changes to your Twitter account and activity:

Filter Who You Follow

You may be following a number of accounts that are no longer active. Following these accounts is a waste of time. Plus it’s generally seen to be better if you have a higher ratio of follower’s to those your follow. This helps to reduce the amount of wasteful people your follow.

You should also make sure that you’re following relevant accounts/people. Are they relevant to your industry? Do they add quality content to your news feed? Get rid of anyone who isn’t relevant or useful.

Create/Update Your Lists

Organise the people you follow into lists. This is an easy way of viewing the updates of key people. Create lists for your customers, partners, suppliers, competitors, industry leaders etc. You may want to make some of these private.

Quality vs Quantity

Now is the time to review what you’re tweeting. It’s not just a numbers game – more isn’t necessarily better. Make sure every single tweet is valuable to those following you and reflects well on your as a business.

Have you any other Twitter resolutions? Leave us a comment below!

We’ve talked about how to use Twitter for business before on the SMEketing online marketing blog, but we thought since we’ve started a new year, we should do a quick refresher post on how you can use it to help grow your business.

How To Use Twitter For Business, Top Tips:

• Make sure your account has been fully set up: Add a proper photo or logo and relevant information. Make sure your profile page is as informative as possible. This is the page that a lot of people will view before following you – so make sure you make a good impression!
• Take your time: Don’t immediately follow every person/account that follows you. Make sure you’re following the right people – people in your industry, competitors, customers, thought leaders. Who you follow says a lot about your online marketing strategy – make sure you’re giving the right message.
• Share valuable information: Sharing links to information which helps promote your product or services is great. But make sure that’s not all you tweet about. Try and make your Twitter feed well rounded – include industry information, customer/service updates, news and advice.
• Be consistent: Make sure you have time to manage your Twitter account. This means replying to any messages or @ replies, conversing on a one to one basis with other users, sharing other users information (retweeting). This must be done on a regular basis for it to have any positive effect. Done correctly and consistently, you’ll be able to create long lasting relationships and create an impression of thought leadership.
• Don’t be negative: As much as you might want to sometimes tell the world about some immoral methods of your competitors, or a poor quality delivery from a supplier, try to resist. What you tweet reflects on you, and it’s always good to take the high-ground. Don’t air your dirty laundry in public!
• Take advantage of the tools available: At SMEketing we love Hootsuite – you can use this to schedule tweets in advance, track any clicks of your shortened links and monitor all messages, @ replies and keywords you make want to track. Another tool we love is TweetDeck.
• Be patient: You’re unlikely to take any orders or make any sales on your first day using Twitter. So be patient and consistent, and you’ll find sooner or later it’s paying off. If your goal isn’t to make sales, you could track things like interaction, visits to your website from Twitter, RTs etc.

Remember, you can follow SMEketing on Twitter: @SMEketing.

If you want more information on how to use Twitter for business please get in touch with us, or visit our social media management information page.

So in no official order, below are the top ten most read blog posts of 2011:

Top Email Marketing Checks To Do Before You Hit Send

Email marketing is a very effective way to communicate with your current and prospect customers. It’s quick, inexpensive and can give you instant results. But it’s important that it’s done right. Make sure you make the most of each eblast by making the following email marketing checks: From Name Is your ‘From’ name recognisable? Will …

Read more »

Google+ For Business

If you’ve been in a coma recently, you might not have heard about Google’s new social media platform, Google+! Even though it’s been around now for a few weeks, there’s still some confusion over how to use it and what it could mean to you both personally and as a business. The service is Google’s …

Read more »

Building Your Email Marketing List : Research Results

A couple of months ago, MarketingSherpa released the results of a study they had undertaken, into the most effective methods of growing an email marketing list. The researchers asked more than 1100 marketers to indicate the effectiveness of various methods used within their organisation. This is what they found: Although these results are based on …

Read more »

Top Black Hat SEO Techniques You Must Avoid

Wikipedia describes black hat SEO as “SEO tactics such as spamdexing, attempt to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines’ terms of service and is often considered unethical SEO.” The alternative is white hat SEO, which are the techniques that are approved by the search engines …

Read more »

Reciprocal Linking – Good or Bad SEO?

If you’ve got a new website and you’re trying to optimise it and improve it’s position in the search engine results for your desired key terms, you may be aware that link building is an important area of SEO that you need to focus on. So it could be tempting to respond positively to an …

Read more »

Secrets of Successful Blogging

The term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, “blog,” was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase “we blog” in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999. Ever since then, people have been blogging for business and for …

Read more »

Top Ten Google AdWord Mistakes – Part Two

Following from our previous post last Thursday, here are the additional five mistakes that we see people make in their Google AdWord Campaigns: 6. Not targetting the right group of searchers: Is your product or services aimed towards a particular demographic or geographical location? Did you know that you can set your AdWord campaigns to target those …

Read more »

MegaBus Robots.txt File Fail

I am organising a trip up to London with some friends in September. We’ve decided to save some money and use the MegaBus to travel from Southampton. Due to my love of all thing organising, I was put in charge of sorting out the costs etc. So first thing I did was to Google MegaBus. …

Read more »

Online Promotion: How to promote a new offer, product or service online

Online promotion is a key marketing method for small businesses. If you’re promoting a new offer, product or service, how can you market it online? One of the key benefits of the Internet is that it creates an even platform – allowing smaller businesses to promote themselves at a relatively low cost. But you still need …

Read more »

Small Business Branding, Logo and Corporate Identity – What’s the Difference?

Okay small business owners, I have some questions for you here: How many of you reading this, know what your logo is? (I’m really hoping you’re nodding along, safe in the knowledge that you know what your logo is! I’ll be scared if  you don’t, unless you’re just starting a new business and haven’t had a …

Read more »

If you want to start 2012 with a bang, get in touch. We love helping businesses grow through using effective online marketing. So if you want more leads, more sales and more growth in 2012 drop us an email or complete our contact form.

• You build relationships through engagement
• Your content will be shared through social media
• People are more likely to comment if they are engaged
• People will stay on your site longer
• People will come back to your site more often
• Prospective customers will trust you and will more more likely to contact you

So how do you go about engaging your readers? It’s not easy, but here are some tips:

Content is king!

How many times have we said that here at SMEketing? It’s the mantra we live by. Without good quality content, your site will never get ranked and will never achieve its goals. Writing high quality blog posts and articles that tackle industry issues, that solve problems, that educate and advise your readers is the key to your success. If you’re answering a problem via a blog post and it successfully helps one of your readers, there’s a very good chance that they’ll come back to your blog on a regular basis and they’ll also tell others about their experience.

Take time to think about your titles

We always talk about the important of subject lines in email marketing, but it’s also important to take this theory and apply it to your other content. The titles are the first things people read – they’re what pulls them in to read more. You’ll use the title when promoting your content in social media and many people will use the title as the anchor text if they’re linking to you. So make sure your titles has been designed to lure people in. And while you’re at it, try to add a good keyword in there too, so any links you do get have good anchor text.

Make it easy to comment and share

The Internet has changes rapidly in the last few years. People want to engage with you – so make sure you make it easy for them! If you want people to comment – make it easy, don’t force them to register with your site before they can do it. Likewise, if you want them to share it on social media sites make it easy – give them a button, let them click and share. Voila! Easy peasy. Remember, it’s an unfortunate fact that people are lazy. We want to be able to do things quickly and easily. No one wants to take the time to open their Twitter in a browser, cut and paste the link (sometimes going via a link shortening tool to do this first), cutting and pasting the title then sharing it. Install a plugin and make it easy for them, otherwise they won’t do it!

Remember to add a call to action

If you want readers to comment, want them to share or even want them to retweet a tweet, then you have to ask them to do it. Sometimes just saying ‘Pls RT’ at the end of a tweet will get people to retweet it. Likewise asking people to leave a comment also works.

Build relationships

If someone comments on your content (be it a blog post, and article or even through a tweet), then please say thank you. Manners cost nothing! Have you ever left a comment on a blog, only to get an email a day or so later saying someone had commented on your comment… you go back to that page to see that the blog owner has personally thanked you for your input. It feels good. It takes hardly any time at all to go back and say thanks. It also shows other would-be commenters that you appreciate any engagement you get.

To summarise, engaging with your readers is something that takes effort and time. But if you remember to be polite and appreciative and direct people to do the things you want then you’ll start to see an increase in engagement levels.

Have you had any success in getting people to engage with you and your content? Give us your tips in the comments below.

1. Go to Google Analytics and review your traffic levels – are you seeing a sudden drop or any other worrying trends?
2. Log into Google Webmaster and see if there are any problems with your site – are there any crawl errors, messages from Google etc?
3. Go to Google and do this search: [site:yoursite.com] – review how many URLs are listed. Is this what you would expect or are you missing quite a few?
4. See what position your site comes up when you make this search: “domain-name” search (without the TLD). If you’re in position 50 or below it’s pretty likely that you’ve got some kind of penalty
5. Has your Google PageRank dropped suddenly? This isn’t always obvious since Google only updates this every 3-4 months, but it’s worth a look just in case
6. Check that your site hadn’t been blacklisted as unsafe for browsing. Type http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=mysite.com (with your domain at the end)
7. Check your inbound links – has there been a sudden rise in poor quality links?
8. Check your outbound links – make sure you’re not linking to any questionable sites. Use http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm
9. Do you have more than one website? If so check thse. Sometimes Google has seemed to devalue the WHOIS domain owner which results in the dropped ranks of all the sites under the same domain account.
10. Take a sentence from one of your website pages – cut and paste this exactly into Google with quote marks surrounding it (exact match). Check to see if the page you took it from ranks at the top
11. Add this bit of code to the search URL : &filter=0 (or click on the “show omitted results” link). If your site shows under this search it means that you’ve been hit with a duplicate content penalty

If you have been penalised then you need to make sure that you identify what it is that you’ve done to cause the penalty. Read the Google Webmaster Guidelines to ensure you comply.

Here’s a video from Google’s SEO spokesperson, Matt Cutts, where he talks about sites that have been penalised and how long these generally last for:

Link building, done correctly, should be a steady process – with a wide variety of links being generated, with a variety of anchor text pointing to a variety of pages.

What kind of activities should you be careful about?

Building too many links at one time: If your website has been ticking along for the last few years, without much work or SEO done to it, you might not have generated many inbound links. If you suddenly start on an Internet marketing campaign with the goal to boost your website, even if you’re doing things the right way, Google may be wary of you if you suddenly go from 5 links to 500 within a week. This is known as ‘link velocity’, and as Tad Chef from the SEOptimize blog says:

“Google is checking the link velocity – aka the rate in which you earn links – and if you get more links than you deserve, you risk a penalty even if the links are perfectly legit.”

Using identical anchor text in links: Anchor text is the clickable part of a link. Having your keywords in this anchor text is a good thing – it tells the search engines exactly what that particular link is about. However, when people naturally link to you, they wouldn’t always use the same anchor text – one person will use a different phrase to describe your business or a web page than another. So having all your inbound links with the same anchor text looks unnatural, and therefore will raise flags.

Getting links from the same sources: Variety is not only the spice of life, it’s the spice of link building too! You need to ensure you’re getting links from a wide range of websites. Getting a high number of links from the same site can look unnatural.

What are the common Google penalties?

Common penalties include:

• Any position 1 or 2′s being dropped to 6 and being stuck there (which was noted for the first time back in 2007, and is called  Google #6)
• All rankings being dropped by 30 places (named the 30 penalty)
• Particular rankings being pushed to the last position (known as the 950 penalty, as it’s an average of a drop of 950 places!)
• Complete ban

Take this case study from from SEOptimize. They wanted to test whether or not generating a high number of low quality links at once would result in any penalties. Author Marcus Taylor went about generating 10,000 spammy links to a new website he created specifically for the experiment. You can see the traffic volume the site was getting below:

Although the test site reached the number 1 position for its target keyword within a few weeks, eventually it was kicked out completely from these rankings. According to Taylor:

“Just as I was beginning to lack faith in Google’s ability to detect the most unnatural of link patterns, the site suddenly dropped out of search results for everything including brand searches, and what’s more it’s never bounced back.”

So what can you take away from this? Besides the obvious, “It’s not a great idea to build 10,000 low quality inbound links at once,” this case study also illustrates why it’s so important to develop a range of different link types over time. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket – instead of relying on just one method to generate inbound inks, use a range of activities that will help to generate a natural link profile.

Avoiding Penalties

Make sure that your link building is done naturally and at a steady pace. Focus on generating and promoting high quality content. Avoid any black hat SEO activities, such as keywords stuffing, using link farms and other dubious link building activities. The goal is to build up a natural looking link profile – full of nice, high quality links.

If you’re looking for some link building help, please get in touch with us today! Email info@SMEketing.com or complete our contact form.