Posted by Ryan in Conversion Optimization on September 29th, 2010
What does conversion optimization mean exactly? Let’s break it down a bit.
So if we put those two words together something great and somewhat surprising happens. In the world of internet marketing conversion optimization becomes the juggernaut of the entire web design world. In the internet marketing family Search Engine Optimization would probably be the granddaddy. It is something that is widely renowned and has been around for quite a while. If that be the case Conversion Optimization would be the burly grandson that can lift a small car without even breaking a sweat. Let me explain. Conversion optimization is fairly new to the scene and if done correctly can have a huge effect on your website endeavors.
Conversion Optimization is a pivotal key to take your website from a mediocre, run of the mill website to an extremely aggressive highly functional website. For example, if we take a person that has 1,000 people visiting their website and optimize their website so that they have 2,000 people visiting their website that is going to make that person somewhat happy I would imagine. Unless those people are not converting into a sell of some sort or a possible lead. Now let’s take that some original 1,000 people and instead let’s make it so that instead of just converting 1% of the people we are now converting 2% of the people. Again we’re making good headway towards the ultimate goal but still it is only incremental. Now what would happen if we were to both optimize the website and make the conversions double at the same time? You got it, we have quantitatively increased our end result. Essentially we have taken the mediocre website and made it a lean mean fighting machine.
In a world of increasingly high competitiveness it is crucial to make the very best of what we have in our arsenal. Conversion Optimization just makes sense. Usually it is the simplest things that have the greatest effects. There is good reason that man has always evolved to make his objectives more streamline and effective. My father always told me growing up that I should work smarter, not harder. Little did I know that he would give me one of my first lessons in conversion optimization.
Posted by Ryan in Web Design on September 6th, 2010
You may think that web design is not very important especially if you live in a small town like Idaho Falls. In reality Idaho Falls web design is more important than ever before. It used to be that businesses could get by with not really having a website. You could do the minimum when it came to advertising, you know yellowbook, tv spot, radio ads the trifecta. That would get you business because people were looking for you and that was about the only spots that they could actually find you. Then came along the internet and changed the whole face of how we communicate as mankind. This was a huge shift and many people started to tell other people about how they found this one guy online and then another person told somebody else and then the snowball began to grow and eventually took over everything. There are few of us that tried to hang on to our old ways of communicating but it was a futile fight and now almost everybody is doing advertising, marketing and communicating online because it is quick and efficient. At this point, having a website for small business is critical. If you live in little old South Eastern Idaho, it's just as important as anywhere. Idaho Falls has lately become one of the most technical cities in the United States. Idaho Falls web design has over the last couple of years become quite crucial!
Which brings me back to the point at hand. The importance of having a well designed website in Idaho Falls. The fact of the matter is that people have become web “browsers” and are no longer “readers”. Not to say that old habits die hard because they do and we can still capitalize on that. People are accustomed to reading from the top of the page to the bottom of the page and of course from left to right. Unless you are from a foreign country and then I don’t know what to tell you there. Using our reading concept, it is important that we list our most important information on our website from top of the page to our least important information at the bottom and again from left of page to right.
Again keeping in mind that we are browsers it is important that we intrigue our online guests within the first five seconds of their visit because if we don’t, most likely they are going to bounce. Good web design is not just mistakenly happening. There are many keys to making your traffic look at what you want them to look at and to go where you want them to go. I will tell you more insiders information about Idaho Falls web design in some upcoming blog posts.
Posted by Ryan in Comparison Shopping, Marketing Research, Pay-Per-Click on August 31st, 2010
Here is the honest truth, and I love pointing this out! Comparison shopping management still is and will typically remain much less expensive than pay per click marketing (in the search engines). Let's take a quick look at the jewelry industry. Right now an average cost per click from PPC for most products are somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.50 to $4.00 per click – ouch. In the comparison shopping engines, we’re looking at $.10 to $.50 per click – yes, much better pricing. People who are shopping in the comparison shopping engines (CSE’s) are usually buyers. Not only are you attracting the right people, but also people ready to buy. The downside is that people who shop jewelry tend to do more shopping than customers of other products. I think that having a return ratio of 1 to 2 is probably on the poor end. An average comparison shopping client should be seeing a ratio of 1 to 4 return or better. With jewelry I think we can be even better – especially if you have the best price (as most people claim).
When Netmark Essentials is starting a paid search campaign for any client or promotion, some of the first questions that come up are, "How are you defining success of this campaign?”, and “What are your recommendations?”
The way we like to answer these questions has significant impact and “tell-tale” to the way your paid search campaigns will be set up and run. This includes keyword selection, product categories, bidding decisions, engine selection, landing pages, analytics, and many more other important factors.
The Netmark Essentials paid search campaign service dives deeper into measuring success than just a typical ROI goal (revenue/ad spend). This goal undervalues the true measure of what drives a successful business — profit.
There was a smart client of ours once brought this point up to me by saying, "You don't put revenue back in the bank. You put your profit in the bank."
But, why is measuring to profit so important, and how can it impact your paid search campaigns? While $1000 in revenue is the same regardless of the product sold, it doesn't always equal the same for profit based on the margin. Let me briefly explain:
For example, a woman’s wedding band and a pair of diamond earrings each cost $1000, but the cost to actually make the woman’s wedding band is much less than the pair of diamond earrings, and therefore is more profitable for the company. If you made your bidding decisions based on revenue, then you wouldn't care if you sold a wedding band or the pair of diamond earrings.
However, if you look at profit, you would value the sale of the wedding band by four times. Knowing this information would change your allowable cost per click (CPC) for each given keyword.
|
|
Wedding Band |
Diamond Earrings |
|
|
Click Spend |
$500 |
$500 |
|
|
Revenue |
$1000 |
$1000 |
|
|
COGS |
$200 |
$800 |
|
|
Profit |
$800 |
$200 |
|
|
Revenue ROI |
200% |
200% |
|
|
Profit ROI |
160% |
40% |
Evaluating the success of your online campaigns doesn't stop at high-level results for just paid search. You measure down to the keyword and product level to ensure the most granular level of data. This is the same concept, only pushing the measurement deeper down the sales funnel. Bottom line, we’ll make better money by focusing funds on products that sell and products that have higher profit margins.
Another point that I’d like to bring up again is the conversion optimization. We typically bill this as a separate charge from our comparison shopping management, but we’ve seen wonders happen with this and massive improvements have been made by having conversion rates go up. Because conversion rates go up, each customer or each click is worth more to you.
Either way – if you offer products as your core business, consider the costs involved with both pay per click from the search engines, and comparison shopping. Dollar for dollar, comparison shopping is one of the best forms of marketing out there. Lastly, make sure you are aware of the profits and ROI. The click through rate doesn't have much to do with the bottom line, however conversions does!
Posted by Ryan in Search Engine Optimization on December 23rd, 2009
Many people have questions about how to rank better and to rank better organically, and it’s quite a complex question even though it may not seem like it. Google, as of just recently, has made major changes to its organic rankings algorithm with what they call real time search results. As everyone knows, you need to make sure that you follow the very best white hat SEO practices when working on your website SEO or search engine optimization. One might find this information from a number of different sources such as Netmark, SEOmoz.org, or even out on Google.
So let’s get to some of the guts of this topic and lets go over some basic things that you can do to rank better and rank better organically. Some simple things to check out… make sure that the HTML coding on your website is correct and simplified. This means that you do not have extra lines of unnecessary code in order to accomplish the same task. Also you want to make sure your content is as close to the top of the (while looking at the source code) page as possible even if you have to put the information in a div and help it reach the top via HTML code. Why should this matter? Well it makes a big difference because the search engines will index a page from top to bottom and from left to right. When you have your index able content as close to the top of the page the search engines will see this and know that you do have some idea of what your doing when it comes to design. Keep in mind that one factor that we’ve determined to help is the content to code ratio. The higher percent of content you have to coding… the more simple your website will be to index. This means bonus points for the search engines.
Another thing to remember is that “Content is King”. That means the more content you have on your site and the more pages you have, gives you better changes of ranking better and ranking better organically. If you ask some of the best SEO marketing firms in the country (high end SEO), they will not even decide to take on a project that has less than 50 pages of content. The reason for that is because the search engines love content. Content equals relevance. Relevance is good especially because the search engines can determine that what content you have and if it’s the most relevant to the search terms being searched for. Here is a big warning though. When you put up content on your website make sure that it is original. Don’t go and copy content off another site and put it up on your site, or you can get penalized for duplicate content and that page will not matter much to the search engines. If you want to put up a new page of content, make sure it is something original and new.
A good way to rank better and rank better organically is to put up a blog on your website. Let me share some cool statistics put out by Google about blog posting just this week.
• There are 900,000 blog posts written every day around the world.
• This means there are over 37,500 written every hour
• This means there are over 625 blog posts written every minute.
Now what should this mean to you? This is one form (of many) called social media marketing. Essentially you are trying to get content and other attention to your website, away from your website. What blogging really can help you achieve is more along the lines of brand awareness and activity that points to your website. Even with the short little blurb at the end that talks about blogging… my point is to point out a few more items that you can do that will help your website rank better organically.
Posted by Ryan in Search Engine Optimization on December 19th, 2009
Over the years I have had many people ask me how important it is to be at the top of Google or to have top rankings on all of the various search engines. Does one search engine matter more then another? There is a saying out there that goes “Go Google It.” There is a reason for such a statement. Google receives anywhere from 65-70 percent of all the search traffic on the internet on a daily basis. You look at that number and you realize that it’s amazing. Another interesting fact is that the remaining 30% or so is split with Yahoo receiving roughly 15% of the remaining traffic, while Bing receives roughly about 10%. The remaining search engine traffic is then split between all the other thousands of search engines out there such as ASK and Lycos.
Here is another interesting fact, statically almost 95% of the public will not look past the first 3 pages of the search engine to find the information they are looking for. I speak with people all day long every day who are asking how difficult it is to get to the top of Google. There is an answer for that and the answer is: it is extremely difficult. It takes a lot of patience and hard work. As you can see by the previous statistics, having top rankings on the search engines is incredibly important. I had a gentleman that I was speak with the other day that was asking me why I thought he needed to have internet marketing done for his business. So, I asked him a question. I asked “When you are looking for information on a product or a company what are the first things you do?” His response was all too well known. “Well I hop on the internet and look up the company.”
Exactly. Advertising on the internet and having top rankings on the search engines is absolutely imperative for your business. Something you may be thinking right now is how do I get my website to the top of Google? The answer is there are many things that you can do. First thing you need to do is make sure you have your content laid out properly on your page. Meaning you need to make sure that you have anywhere from 300-500 words of content on your pages. Secondly you need to insert your keywords into that content. This is imperative for the search engines to give you credit for your keywords.
You need to have your images optimized and by that I mean when you have an image on your website its physical name should not be image.jpg or 001image or something to that effect. It should be titled with what exactly the image involves, and should also contain your keywords, like Auto-Car-Dealer.png. Things like this seem small but there are literally hundreds of things that need to take place in order to get things worked out on your site so that you are able to achieve top rankings for the desired keywords.
Posted by Ryan in Search Engine Optimization on December 11th, 2009
It is that time of year again every one to figure on next years marketing budget. Most small and even large businesses are putting together their budgets for the New Year. Now above almost any other time of year is the time for Small Business SEO to be considered and put into your marketing plans for the next year. Now what is sad is there are still some companies out there that think that the internet is just a waste of time and money. They come from an old mindset of this is how we used to do things 15 years ago and this is how we are going to keep doing things or they hear about people who are making money hand over fist on the internet and just don’t have the first clue on how they can profit from such an investment.
SEO for Small Business is a complicated but very effective strategy for any company to take, and in today’s world is absolutely a necessity. I have clients with number one ranking positions on the internet for very competitive keywords that say “What Recession?” The truth of the matter is that if you are not doing your advertising on the internet right now by doing small business SEO, you soon might find yourself out of business.
SEO for small Business is so vital because the internet is considered to be the new phone book. Back in the day when you wanted to find out information, you would pick up the phone book and call the business. In today’s world that has changed dramatically. By some studies that were taken nearly 75% or more of people under the age of 40 do not even have a phone book in their home or even use a phone book any more. Terms such as “just go Google it” have taken so much that most people when they are looking to find out information do just that.
So right now you are probably asking yourself, ok what can I do to improve my rankings in Google and the other search engines to get to the top? The answer is that there are many different things you can do. For instance you need to make sure that your code is cleaned up to be neat and tidy. You need to make sure you have the proper use of heading tags, and that they are being used properly. You need to make sure that you have content on you site that is able to be indexed by search engines and not in images. You need to make sure that you properly label your image files with your keywords, and not just make them “image.jpg” or something similar. That’s just a start.
In the end, there are hundreds of things that you can do to make sure that the SEO for small business is done and done correctly. I will not joke with you, there are hundreds of factors that the search engines use to decide where you are placed. The best way to do that is to make sure you either study up on what needs to be done from relevant sources, or that you pay a good company to do your SEO and your online marketing for you. If you might be thinking “Do I really need this?”, then the real question you should be asking yourself is “Can I really afford not to do SEO while my competition is?” I know we’ve stated it before, but it’s so true; If you’re not in the first position on the first page – one of your competitors is!
Posted by Ryan in Search Engine Optimization on November 28th, 2009
Almost well known for SEO at this point, Idaho is probably most popular for its big russet potatoes. They grow well here in our rich volcanic soil and are a favorite of people from all over. The conditions in Idaho are just right for growing potatoes; however, you might be surprised to know that they are also just right for producing Idaho SEO firms and more specifically Idaho Falls SEO firms.
Netmark Essentials is based out of Idaho Falls, Idaho and provides the best Search Engine Optimization available. A huge part of that is due to the people that run and work for this firm. Idahoans are well known for being hard working. They also possess other quality characteristics. So, aside from being hard working our Idaho SEO professionals are also:
Our knowledge and passion is what really sets Netmark apart from any other Idaho SEO firm. As internet marketing experts, our clients seek our services for our extensive years of knowledge and expertise in the industry. Because each and every member of our company resides in Idaho Falls, our Idaho Falls SEO team of experts enjoys living in a community that loves and relies on technology. They keep up with the ever-changing industry through conferences, webcasts, blogs, online forums, news updates, testing, and more. Ultimately, we are in business to help others be successful online.
Netmark Essentials was founded with the objective to help any size business or organization improve their visibility online through strategic internet marketing processes. So, no matter what size your company is or where it is located at on the globe, give our Idaho Falls SEO firm a chance to live up to our reputation. Hey, if you want we’ll even send you a box of Idaho potatoes.
Posted by Ryan in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization on November 3rd, 2009
I had a potential client that asked me just today how to get more traffic to his website and how to move up in Google. He is an insurance agent in the Eastern United States who is just amazed at what he had learned from a local conference he recently returned from.
“I have had a website for several years now. It had been doing ok for me but has never really generated much traffic, nor has it really moved up on Google. I just got back from a conference and was speaking with several of my colleges who have taken charge in their business and are focusing almost all of their marketing efforts now on Internet marketing.”
“They said they had been toying with the idea for some time now and after they had tried to do a bit of it themselves, failed, and went ahead and hired an Internet marketing firm. They asked them specifically how to get more traffic and how to move up in Google with SEO. I have looked over their numbers Sky and there is definitely something they are doing that I am not. ”
“I want to do that as well. Sky it is now time for me to ask you very specifically how to get more traffic and how to move up in Google? With a little help in SEO and conversion optimization I think I should be able to at least capture what they are doing if not more. After speaking with you I understand now what I need to do exactly and what it will take to get my business where it needs to be.”
We hear stories like this day in and day out here. Almost every day do I here customers ask something to the effect of how to get more traffic or how to move up on Google. I consider us to be one of the top SEO and Internet Marketing firms in the Country. When you are trying to get more traffic to your website there are a lot of things that you can do.
Below is a simple tip to get you started:
First and foremost you need to make sure your site is well coded to be search engine friendly. An easy way to get started on this is to consult Google Webmaster Tools. They have a lot of really great ideas to get you started. The next step is to make sure your coding is well optimized. Google is known to index code from top to bottom and from left to right. Think about it, make sure that in your coding the things that get indexed first are the information explaining exactly what your website is about, even before you allow Google to see your images or navigation. This is accomplished fairly easily with “div tags”. Div Tags allow you to place code anywhere you like, and still have it look presentable on the user version of your website.
Please feel free to inquire with us about what you can do to get your website traffic where you want it to be, and where it SHOULD be. Let us know how we can help you get the business you so rightfully deserve.
Posted by Ryan in Search Engine Optimization on October 30th, 2009
There are many businesses on the internet that are not being found period. One of the main reasons this is the case is because most businesses don’t have a website optimized to get Top Google Rankings. Google’s specific algorithm in ranking websites from #1 through thousands or even millions consists on many factors. The two largest factors (and fairly broad) are how relevant and how important are you when it comes to a specific keyword.
Better Google Rankings is one way that will substantially improve the amount of business that you will see from solid search engine optimization. Google has reported that 42% of searchers will click on the #1 ranking which makes the #1 spot for a keyword very coveted. It is critical however that you have top Google rankings for keywords that are relevant to your industry as well as have quality monthly internet users searching for those keywords.
There are many companies out there that claim that they can get you top Google rankings, but be leery as to what they are promising. Good quality Search Engine Optimization (SEO) requires patience. Any company that has a selling point on getting you to the #1 ranking in 30 days might be something to strongly beware of. There is no question that the right technique and strategy can potentially make that happen, but it usually comes at a major financial cost. It’s true, most of the time getting you to have top Google rankings takes time and energy.
To get better Google rankings, my first piece of advice is to search for the right company. Just like any other industry, there are many who will make large promises, but ultimately fail to deliver results. There are some key questions you should ask. See this earlier SEO blog post about questions to ask.
Look for companies that are reputable and can show you results with case studies from previous and current clients. These companies are ones that can show you results that are expected without over promising and under delivering. Your website is a critical part of your business in the online world and getting Better Google Rankings can show your customers that you are a leader in the industry and you can deliver to their needs.
For more information on SEO and other forms of internet marketing, check out the rest of our informative website. Most of our tips and tricks will help you to get those top Google rankings you’ve been dreaming about :)
Posted by Ryan in Link Building, Search Engine Optimization on October 26th, 2009
What is link building anyway? For those of you who may still be unsure of the term “link building” let me give you a quick definition and an example that portrays link building in its simplest form. Link building is a third party endorsement. For example, if I were to walk into Olive Garden and ask them which restaurant provided the best Italian food, Olive Garden would obviously promote itself by saying that it was the best. But, how can you trust such a biased answer? However, if I were talking to a random person off of the street, and I asked him the same question and he answered: “Olive Garden has the best Italian food around,” his answer would be a lot more valuable to me because it wasn’t a biased response. It was a third party endorsement that was not trying to endorse any particular company.
Now that we are more familiar with the definition of link building, what is the most efficient and cost effective way to build links? There are many sites out there that will build links for you, but they tend to cost a lot of money and often they do not add your URL to the best of sites. The most cost effective way to build links is to do reciprocal linking. This means that you add a link to a different site’s URL onto one of your own pages and they will, in return, add your link to their page for free. This works pretty well to help build traffic to your site. When you are doing reciprocal linking try to find sites that have a solid page rank. This will help to add more value to your own website.
While reciprocal link building is the most cost friendly solution, the best links are one way links. Google gives more value to one way links. It sees them as the most significant links because a site out there is providing a link back to your site for nothing in return. Google can’t figure out why a site would do one way linking unless the site he is adding a link to is extremely valuable and contains useful information. As a result, Google will give your site better page rank. One way linking is the best method to help bring traffic and value to your site. However, it is extremely tough to find a site that will agree to do one way link building. Usually, you have to offer something in exchange for it such as a payment.
Link building is one of the most important factors in SEO; however, it also proves to be one of the most difficult tasks as well. I’m not trying to put down On Page work because On Page plays a huge role in successful SEO. On Page work is what makes a site relevant and link building is what makes it important. The two work hand in hand with each other, and must be used for any site to be successful in SEO.
