(512) 537-5868
(512) 537-5868
No longer is it just large businesses that are using video marketing as a way to increase their presence online. Today it is something that many small businesses are finding an effective tool in helping to gain an edge over their competitors and help them to attract more traffic to them.
So why are people choosing to use video marketing rather than banner or pop up ads to advertise what they have to offer today?
Quite simply it is down to the fact that video marketing allows you to create a more personal connection with potential customers to your business. If a person is faced with a video of someone talking to them or demonstrating something they are more likely to stick with it and find out what it is about. However of course when it comes to banner and pop up ads we simply find them annoying and will completely ignore them rather than learning more about what they have to offer.
Through videos a person is able to build up some kind of rapport with the person viewing it and as a result they are more likely to gain that persons trust. The more comfortable a person feels about dealing with someone they haven’t actually met then the more chances there are of them actually wanting to know more and then making a purchase from that person.
There’s no doubt that having a website for your brick and mortar business is crucial, and even necessary these days.
But it’s not enough just to have any old website. You need a website that will draw traffic, aka visitors, who are surfing the web. These are visitors you wouldn’t otherwise have and they can make a huge difference in the success or failure of your online presence.
By your choice of words…
* in your content
* in your content titles
* in your graphics titles
* behind the scenes of your site
* in your links to other pages of your site
Some words are better than others because they are searched for again and again by TONS of people. Some words, called longtail keywords, are searched for a lot yet have little competition from other sites (not as many sites use these keywords). If you use these favorable longtail keyword phrases it may mean you can land on page 1 in Google for the phrase.
The result of being on page 1 of the Google search engine is huge! Just think what it means if people find your website on the first page of their search – a marked influx of traffic and a big new market of people to market to.
We can help you find the best keywords for your website. We can also tell you where to add them to your site in all the right places. Let me know if you’d like to talk about this powerful traffic-getting technique.
Your Austin SEO Company 13581 Pond Springs Road, Suite 301 Austin, TX 78729
This past Thursday Google announced a change in it’s algorithm or the incredibly complex formula that Google uses to determine how to rank any particular web page for any particular keyword. Did I mention complex?
So why did Google make this change?
There are a lot of sites who exist in the rankings for reasons other than they provide original content. There’s been a rush in the past few years for the registering of domain names that are parallel to specific keywords or exact match keyword domains. These are domains like igotmycellphonewethowdoifixit.com. The intent is to score traffic for those who type the same phrase into the search engines. Search engines favored an exact match to a domain name over an older, maybe more authoritative site.
Often these exact match domains were very thin on content aka pages. So these sites were given a ranking in search results that didn’t match the level of authority just the cleverness of scoring an exact match domain.
Google doesn’t feel like the use of a domain name that matches a search phrase should be given as heavy weight as they have.
So website owners that built hundreds of thin exact match domain sites that were making a lot of adwords advertising rewards because they were ranking very high on page one without a lot of backlinks, will over time see this new algorithm alter the ranking.
Also websites that are comprised entirely of non-original or syndicated content will lose ranking. Many sites pull in data that is published on other sites and search engines can tell what’s original and what essentially duplicate content from other sites. Syndication is not a bad way to bring in content but if that’s the only source of your content, Google is now making it clear that it will not reward your site by ranking it high.
Should you be concerned about any Google change?
Again, it goes to show that despite how you feel about Google, they want to serve the best options to their clients – those that use the Google search engine – and that seems to be a lot of us. Market share when I last checked was around 70% when compared to Yahoo and Bing.
If you are a business – whether ecommerce or a local brick and mortar, the best thing you can do for your website is to continue to provide relevant content based on the keywords you know relate to what your clients are looking for. One article that spells out everything you do will be less effective than five separate articles where each one focuses on a specific service or product.
Continue to build backlinks from relevant sites so you build authority in your site.
If you feel like you’re in information overwhelm and not sure what you need to be doing or even sure you even want to be doing what you know will help your business – contact me here as I can help as your Austin SEO Consultant.
If you’ve noticed any changes in your site’s ranking since Feb 24, 2011, post them below.
If Google has their way, many Austin area restaurants and shops will have a sticker with the Google Maps logo on it but it won’t be just any sticker. It will have embedded technology (NFC or near field communication) that could be transmitted to your cell phone. No checking in, no web browser – just boom – customer connected to business.
In the future this may be how you pay for things in the store – just wave your phone to purchase something because it has NFC technology in it.
Austin is the second city in the new Google campaign, in December they focused on Portland, Ore. Yipee, its our turn.
Its Google’s latest effort to catch up with the restaurant review giant, Yelp and other location services like FourSquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places. The Google incarnation is called Hotpot.
Anything that can make search results for consumers provide a more personalized as well as provide other user’s comments and ratings is going to desireable to Google.
“About 20 percent of search queries are looking for local information. That’s out of about 2.5 billion queries a day,” Hernandez said. “Whether you’re looking for a plumber or a restaurant, they’ll be displayed in Google results in a much more prominent way.”
What do you think?
What could it mean to your business in terms of dollars if your website came up higher in the search engines? When you think about it – its quite a simple formula – the more targeted traffic that come to your site and do something, you generate more business. For the purpose of this article, I’ll focus on the getting more people to your site. What is important to realize is that just a small increase in rankings – or how high on the searge page your website comes – can have a profound impact on your business.
Plainly speaking, the higher your business website comes up on Google, the more customers will find you. That’s straightforward, yes? What is not that obvious is how your ranking coorelates to your bank balance. Getting your website to rank on the first page of Google for your search terms such as “dentist Austin TX” is the first step.
If you want to maximize the profit from your website your goal should be to rank not only on Page 1, but at position # 1. The way that works is if your site is #1, more people click the #1 site than the #9 site.
You might rank third on Google for a keyword. If your site can get to the #1 position for that term, you can expect your traffic to quadruple for that keyword.
You may find that statement impossible to believe, but the information comes from Google. Back in 2006, AOL, whose search is powered by Google, leaked data on 29 million Web queries collected from 650 thousand users over three months. When that data was analyzed, here’s the percentage of clicks each position got: No. 1 gets 42.13 percent; No. 2 gets 11.90 percent, or 3.5 times fewer than No. 1; and No. 3 gets 8.5 percent.
Ninety percent of all clicks went to the results on the first page, with more than 40 percent going to the top result.
So how much can you afford to spend on increasing your rank and still make money? You will need to have some idea of your conversion ratio – how many leads per month and how many of those convert into paying customers.
Your conversion ratio is how many visitors it takes to make a sale. If you get 10,000 visitors a month to your website and can attribute 200 sales to it, your conversion ratio (sales/visits) is 2 percent. (If you don’t have a site yet, use 1 percent as your ratio, just to be very conservative.)
You can use a great free tool to find out how many searches are done on a given month in Google – The Google Keyword Tool. By typing in the search term you can see how many local searches meaning in the US are done on a monthly basis. And you can even have it give you related keyword ideas so you can perhaps discover other ways people look for your service or product.
Say your research shows that there are 1000 searches a month for your preferred keyword. And you’d like as many as possible of those 1000 searches to direct people to you rather than your competitor. And say you make $500 a sale and convert 1 percent of visitors into customers.
If your site ranks # 1, about 40 percent of those 1000 searchers (400) will click through to your website. That’s 4 sales – or $2000 a month in profit. If your site ranks # 5, you’ll get about 5 percent of the clicks possible, or 150 a month. At one sale per 100 visitors, you’d average about one and a half sale per month.
So now that you see how the ranking and the numbers add up, you can get an idea of how much return on your investment of getting your site to rank higher. What you’re looking for is search engine optimization services. An improvement in where your website ranks often pays off very well; SEO in general gets a better return for a longer period of time than many online marketing methods.
If your goal in 2010 is to earn more from your website investment, look into boosting your ranking. If you would like to schedule a no cost consultation to discuss your goals for your website in 2011, contact me today.
According to Nielson Reports, in July 2010 internet searches declined from the previous July by 16%. The total number of searches in the US has decreased from 105 billion ot 8.8 billion. But according to Comscore, total US search volume increased 15.1% in the same period. Comscore came up with a new search metric to make sure they were counting actual searches.
Both of them showed Google market search share drop. Comscore indicated that it went from 66.2% of searches in June to 65.8% in July.
So what does this mean?
A couple of things that might be affecting raw search engine searches.
1. mobile phone searches which don’t seem to be accounted for in this data
2. social media searches which also aren’t included
3. Youtube searches again – MIA
Tell me what you think – have your search habits changed?
SEO News