All posts with the tag 'SEO'

SEO, Panda 3.3, Link Quality and Relevance

One of our bloggers offered an interesting perspective on link building, which has undergone a metamorphosis over the past two years, including changes with the Google Panda algorithm shift. This is true for almost any type of business, whether it happens to be a law firm, insurance agency or high tech company. A few highlights are below:

* Off-page SEO often leverages link development. For many years there was a race to achieve superior link quantity. For the last few years, however, search engines have refocused their algorithms to focus on quality over quantity.

* Link quantity enhances a page’s web visibility, but no longer to a large extent. Link quality is the more important indicator of authority. Authority is a quality assigned to a site by a search engine algorithm to ascertain how much expertise the site has on the topics it covers. Quality links emanate from content-rich, relevant sources, ideally with high page ranks, and promote a site’s authority. It is also crucial that these links be unidirectional (nonreciprocal).

* Even link quality, however, is now being downgraded by search engines relative to the effects of social media activity, content quality, and content freshness. Once the new algorithm shifts for 2012 are fully in effect (for example Google Panda 3.3), we will begin to experience, from a SERP perspective, the full nature of the changes and their impact.

For more information on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), review our many SEO blogs or join our Insurance Agency SEO group on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=3735783

 

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Give It To Google – 2nd Quarter Revs Rise Over 30%

Digital Marketing Here To Stay

According to Google, the Internet continues to be the place to be, or at least this can be deduced from their second quarter revenues which were released yesterday. Highlights included record revenues at $9 Billion, and net income of $2.5 Billion. International revenue continued to climb and represented 54% of total revenues. Paid clicks also increased significantly as ad revenues continue to shift from traditional media to Google clicks (PPC campaigns).

What does this mean to the average business owner? Digital marketing is here, and it’s here to stay. Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and a professional and optimized website are the foundation for many if not most businesses. Social Media Marketing, website video, eMarketing and webinar marketing represent great areas of opportunity for almost any business today. And if we look at Google’s numbers, this is increasing in importance, not decreasing.

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Newspaper Advertising Sinks To A 25 Year Low

Last week I read on Yahoo that newspaper advertising has sunk to a 25-year low as marketers shift more of their spending to the Internet. The AP article mentioned that only $26 billion was spent on newspaper ads last year, which is the lowest amount since 1985 ($25 billion).  But the numbers are actually much worse, because $25 billion in 1985, adjusted for inflation, would be about $50 billion today.

Declining print ads have been severely impacting newspaper’s main source of income. The reasons are as numerous as they are obvious. Progressively more people are turning to the internet to glean their daily information. Traditional newspapers are as slow as they are inefficient. A newspaper delivered to your door requires printing, folding, truck distribution to local delivery routes and finally an individual who must drive door to door to drop off the newspaper. Beyond the distribution challenges, advertisements are hard to measure and track, making them less attractive than many online alternatives.

Newspapers will need to move to a profitable online model, and they will need to do so quickly. The web offers much faster and cheaper distribution, and the new PC Tablets and Kindle type devices are making it more attractive to read newspapers online. The days of paper newspapers will soon come to a close, whether it’s ten years or twenty is difficult to say, but the “writing is on the wall”, the foreshadowing abundantly evident.

Other types of businesses should stand up and take notice. If their marketing has not yet embraced web marketing initiatives, the time is now. Social media marketing, search engine marketing, Pay Per Click, SEO, blogging, vlogging and ePublishing should all be considered. These web marketing tools certainly represent the future of marketing, but then again, they are tools many business are already using today.

www.startupselling.com

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ePublishing As A Marketing Vehicle For Startups, Entrepreneurs And Emerging Companies

ePublishing offers startup companies an opportunity for high level marketing impact, yet requires no cash outlay. This should be an attractive formula for most if not all startups, entrepreneurs, home office based businesses, emerging companies or essentially any company tight on cash. Though there is no capital investment needed, it does require the ability to write reasonably well and to invest time and energy in an educational and non-promotional topic. However, for many startups and entrepreneurs, there is often an abundance of knowledge to share, and many actually yearn for a platform from which they may share their new ideas and concepts.

Leading ePublishers don’t allow promotional articles, embedded links or personal rants. Articles must conform to a multitude of specifications to be accepted. The content must be educationally oriented, it must be properly formatted, grammar must be correct and word density in some cases cannot exceed four or five percent for a particular keyword phrase. This emanates from the ePublisher’s desire to eliminate “keyword stuffing”, in a similar manner to Google’s perspective on the same issue when it comes to SEO.

Of course, you may be asking how it will help your start-up to write these articles if they cannot be promotional in nature. The answer lies in the information you can provide, not the actual product, service or solution your company offers. For example, if you sell a better, more durable, longer lasting sweatshirt, you can write an article about the innovative material now available for sweatshirts as opposed to writing an article about why your sweatshirts are better than other sweatshirts. Another example might be a web development company. Instead of writing about why your new company is the best web development company in the world, you can write about technology used in your marketplace, perhaps an article about the advantages of using PHP in website development over an HTML based website design.

The benefits to start-ups can be significant. Startups are often idea rich and cash poor, lacking the capital and marketing budget for a traditional marketing campaign. ePublishing offers the following marketing advantages:

1. Drive web traffic to your new website

2. Improve SEO resulting in better search engine results

3. Provide credible, published content for prospects

4. Provide dynamic content for your website

5. Provide back links to your website

6. Re-purpose blog content (blogs are often a compelling basis for an article)

7. Appear high in search engine rankings when interested parties search for specific content (electronically published articles can often appear on Google page one results for example, eclipsing much more established web site if the content is current and on topic)

ePublishing offers a level playing field for start-up companies seeking to compete with more established firms. You don’t need to be a technical guru to submit an article, you don’t need capital, the user interfaces tend to be easy to use and quality ePublishers offer plenty of guidance and suggestions on writing quality articles. What does your start-up need to get articles published? You need an interesting idea, 250 or more, well written words (though this can vary by publisher) and some patience when starting out with your first few articles. It can take a week or so to find out if your article is accepted, and in my opinion, for start-ups, entrepreneurs and other emerging companies, it is well worth the wait.

For more information, read Your Virtual Success (Career Press) http://www.amazon.com/Your-Virtual-Success-Finding-Profitability/dp/1601631014.  StartUpSelling provides outsourced B2B marketing, sales and lead generation services focusing in the areas of eMarketing, telemarketing, SEO, insurance agency social media marketing and website development. StartUpSelling specializes in innovative entrepreneurial marketing and sales concepts.

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Simple SEO – An Oxymoron?

SEO ranks somewhere between boiling a pot of water and the theory of relativity in complexity, preferring the former over the latter, let’s see if an oversimplification can yield benefit to those who are curious, but have not yet embarked upon the SEO journey for their website. In simple terms, search engines rank websites on their respective relevance to a particular search term used. For example, if you were an insurance agent and typed “insurance agency leads”, a listing of relevant sites would be rendered by a search engine, most notably, Google, Bing and Yahoo.

How Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines determine this relevancy is the source of much speculation and consternation. Some say Google uses over 200 variables in determining the ranking results to assess which sites match a specific keyword phrase typed in by a given user. Of these 200 variables, several seem to hold more importance than others. These include domain name, page title, H1 header tags, keyword density, blog and back links, the links from other sites to your website.

If you want to work on your own site, it’s fairly simple to make adjustments to your page titles, header tags and keyword density. It’s also simple to start blogging on WordPress for example. I would consider these activities leaning toward the boiling water comparison. Building back links, ePublishing, integrating with social media sites, extensive optimization of HTML, use of alt image tags and other more esoteric on page optimization techniques and ongoing analysis of SEO is much more complex, not requiring the genius of Einstein, but most assuredly requiring an acute understanding of SEO. So, is SEO really simple or highly complex? I guess it is all “relative” after all.

For more information on web marketing topics, visit:   http://www.startupselling.com/services.html or   read Your Virtual Success: http://www.amazon.com/Your-Virtual-Success-Finding-Profitability/dp/1601631014

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ePublishing – 3,350 views and counting

ePublishing or electronic publishing is one of the many new manifestations of the increasingly pervasive reach of the internet. Though many traditional publsihers may not like this new trend, another threat to established publishers, I for one am very impressed with the model. I’ve now published 50 articles on Ezine, one of the leading ePublishing sites on the net and have seen 3,350 viewers read these articles. Ezine does not allow self promotional articles, nor do they accept rants or raves. Articles must meet a long list of criteria to be published, from beneficial content to grammar and formatting.  Articles are published for free, Ezine earns their fees from PPC ads.

Sometimes the view results of my articles are surprising, for example my top three articles are:

Article Title/Views/Clicks/Click %/Votes/Date Posted

Should You Hire an Insurance Agency Producer Without an Insurance Agency Marketing Program? 352 27 7.7% Rating: Rating: Rating: Rating: Rating: 05/26/2010
Are the Days of Direct Mail Marketing Dead For Insurance Agencies? 301 39 13.0% Rating: Rating: Rating: Rating: Rating: 06/02/2010
How to “Insure” the Success of New Salespeople 242 19 7.9% Rating: Rating: Rating: Rating: rating: 4.5000 03/19/2010

Actually I thought my article on the Prospect Scorecard would be one of my most valuable and popular, however it is currently running in the middle of the pack for views to date. Note that the author interface shown above tracks click through rate (13% was the highest click through rate for these articles) and the number of stars people allocate for voting. I’ve found vertically oriented articles to offer the greatest pull for both me and my clients. StartUpSelling provides marketing services for any B2B company but we’ve found a vertical approach to be most effective for both our own marketing and ePublishing. We now post many articles on behalf of our clients in areas including: legal practices, insurance agents, consultants, training firms, software and technology companies. If you would like to read some of these articles click on the following link:  http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Alan_Blume

To read more about virtual sales and marketing, read Your Virtual Success: www.yourvirtualsuccess.net or go to www.startupselling.com

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Search Engine Optimization and Long Tail Keywords

Over the past year our company embarked upon an SEO experiment. We tested several techniques using numerous keyword phrases to determine how fast we could rise in the organic search engine results (the non advertisement results listed in a Google, Yahoo or Bing search).  One of our primary target markets is insurance agencies, so we selected a dozen long-tail keyword phrases germane to this market. When we began this experiment, we were ranked very low, in some cases as low as page 10 on Google, in other cases we were simply unranked.  Our goal was to rapidly reach page one on Google search results.

We began with a keyword analysis, determining which phrases we deemed most valuable to our marketing services agency and which keyword phrases had less competition. Long-tail keywords are typically three word phrases and more specific than a broad based single keyword. For example, “California Transportation Litigation” would be a good example of a long-tail keyword phrase, whereas “Litigation” would be a very broad keyword. “Insurance Agent Leads” would be another long-tail example while “Insurance” is another example of a broad and seemingly vague keyword.

Some of the long-tail keyword phrases we chose included:

  • Insurance Agency SEO
  • Insurance Agency Leads
  • Trucking Agency Leads
  • Trucking Agency Marketing

As of this writing we are ranked Google page one for all of these long-tail keywords. We currently appear as the #1 entry for the first three long-tail keyword phrases and we appear #2 for trucking agency marketing. Some of these terms are highly focused, with 100 to 200 searches per year; other keyword phrases we selected are searched thousands or tens of thousands of times per year.  We appear on Google page one (and Yahoo for that matter) for many other of our selected long-tail keyword phrases. How long did this take? In almost all cases, Google page one rankings were accomplished in 90 days. We have also seen similar results for many of our B2B clients, which tend to be professional service companies, insurance agencies or B@B technology companies.

How is this accomplished? We approached our SEO experiment using both on page and off page optimization techniques. The on page techniques included the modification of:

  • Page Title
  • Description
  • Keywords
  • H1-H4 Tags
  • Alt Image Tags
  • Keyword Density
  • Blog Integration
  • Dynamic Content

There were many additional on page optimizations used, but the changes noted above are of critical importance.  Off page optimization included ePublishing, directory submissions, link building, blog distribution, and social media marketing. There is almost no limit to the amount of content which can be generated outside of your website, but you have to start somewhere and then continue to invest in your content development. Though it may seem obvious, all of the off page optimization requires a link back to your website. More links is one of the many elements the search engines use when deciding which web sites to display in their organic search listings.

As of this writing, an increasing number of our new clients are arriving from the efforts noted above, with SEO, LinkedIn, ePublishing, and blogging now generating over 25 % of our new business activity. We believe that the list above will soon constitute 50% of the leads generated for our own business, and expect other companies to find a similar result over time. Many of these topics are covered in my recently released book, Your Virtual Success, available online and at all major bookstores.

www.startupselling.com www.alanblume.com www.yourvirtualsuccess.net

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If Someone Hands You a Scalpel, It Doesn’t Make You a Surgeon – You Should Think of Web Marketing in the Same Way

There are many powerful marketing tools now available, everything from eMarketing engines and Search Engine Optimization Tools to ePublishing and Web Seminar Software.  Any of these tools can be very helpful to your business, but placed in the wrong hands, they can be extremely dangerous. Not long ago, a CEO mentioned to me that they were sending out tens of thousands of emails through their eMarketing “platform” and they could do so very inexpensively. Their platform (let’s call it an integrated web site and eMarketing system) could send out as many emails as they wanted. Their provider suggested they contact some email list brokers where they could buy tens of thousands of emails.  They even had some sample emails from other companies they could use.

Unfortunately, their email “blasts” of tens of thousands of emails, purchased from a list broker, resulted in no response. Literally, nobody responded to their offer. This is a good example of placing the aforementioned scalpel in the hands of a layperson. Placing this type of technology in the hands of untrained individuals is a recipe for failure, regardless of the ease of use of the application. This example is laden with huge issues:

  1. The email list they purchased looked like a low quality list, with first name, middle initial and last name all merged into one field, resulting in problematic personalization.
  2. The company was trying to “sell” something in their email – always try to educate or enlighten
  3. The email was graphically rich (a definite issue for many spam filters)
  4. Large scale email blasts often result in your prospects blocking your email address or in some cases your domain.
  5. They already burned their first opportunity to make a positive impression with all of these potential prospects

So before you hit the button and blast out 10,000 or 20,000 emails, and before you decide to run some of your own webinars:

  • Carefully study emails which you receive and like – why are they good – why did you open it
  • Attend webinars which sound interesting and relevant to you – how long are they – did you stay
  • Read a book about these new web marketing topics – read a few
  • Seek advice and guidance from experts in the field – surgeons get training and so should you

Make your web marketing operation safe and successful by combining advanced tools with knowledge and training to ensure the health of your program initiatives.

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Webinar Tomorrow: Blogging, Social Media and SEO for Lead Generation & Growth

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing for B2B Lead Generation

A brief, complimentary web seminar on Blogging, Social Media and SEO – New Marketing Tools for Lead Generation & Growth is open to registrants. We will review the new rules which apply to marketing and why sooner is better when it comes to social media marketing. Topics include SEO, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, ePublishing, Blogging andsocial media marketing – live presentation of the Ezine dashboard and content centric approach to marketing.

* Blogging for Leads
* ePublishing or Blogging – which is better and why?
* Search Engine Optimization – SEO or PPC
* Should my company Link, Friend or Tweet?
* Social Media Marketing or eMarketing for your business

June 17th at Noon ET: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/864983264

For more information: info@startupselling.com

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Insurance Agency Marketing & Lead Generation – Google Pages or Yellow Pages

Where do your fingers do the walking these days? It was a catchy slogan back in the day, and when it comes to major purchases, people still let their fingers do the walking, they just happen to be walking on a keyboard as opposed to a phone book. Google’s $500 a share stock price seems to offer compelling proof of this, as Google and the other major search engines have become the Yellow Pages of today, with significant advantages to both the consumer and advertiser.

Consumers are rapidly embracing the internet to find products and services they need. Thinking about insurance for your business? Looking for property and casualty insurance? How about healthcare insurance? These days, it seems slow and tedious to pull out the Yellow Pages, search through the book until you arrive at the letter “I” and then scan down the page to an insurance agency lead generation advertisement. Granted, on rare occasion, I do use the Yellow Pages to find someone locally, perhaps to clean the gutters on my house or to deliver a truckload of mulch, but that only happens when on rare occasion, and usually for an inexpensive product or service. If an insurance agency wants their message to reach me, my family or my colleagues, it will likely be displayed over the Internet.

There are two ways to display your Insurance Agency name in front of prospects on a Google Search Results Page. One is for free, and one comes with a fee. The latter is called a Pay Per Click ad (PPC) whereby you use Google AdWords to display a small add at the top or to the side of the organic Google search results. Each time your ad is displayed, you pay a small fee, when someone clicks on the ad to see your web site or landing page. The theory is that if someone clicks your ad, they are interested in your product or service, and you only pay when they click. In reality, they may be an unqualified buyer, or even your competitor – if they click – you still pay. The rates are relatively modest, for example, it might only cost a dollar or two (or a few) per click. But over a month, at two dollars a click and 10 clicks a day, you have spent $600, which adds up to $7,000 per year. Of course you can limit your budget and determine exactly how much you want to pay, but a better way, is to show up in the organic Google search results for free. The organic results, meaning the ten results that are not advertisements, but are Google’s best estimate of the content the user is searching for, are better for several reasons:

1. Users consider them to be truly relevant since Google “found” them based on content criteria.

2. There are no fees associated with the appearance of your web site, thus if displayed a thousand times (in a thousand searches), your costs are still zero.

3. If competitors or unqualified buyers are clicking on the organic search result (your web site link), it doesn’t matter, since there are no costs associated with organic clicks.

Optimizing your web site to appear on the first page of Google’s search results (or Yahoo, Bing, etc.) is called SEO, Search Engine Optimization. There are two major components to this, on page optimization and off page optimization. On page optimization revolves around the placement of keywords in your content and the underlying HTML coding (Header tags, Alt Tags, Keyword Description, Page Titles, Site Maps, etc.). An insurance agency marketing keyword campaign might include the following keywords: Truck Insurance, Fleet Insurance and Freight Insurance. These keywords can also be geographically expressed for local or regional insurance agencies. For example, Truck Insurance Massachusetts or Truck Insurance MA could also be used. Off page optimization includes things like external links, blogs, ePublishing, Social Media and other exogenous factors that “point” to your website. SEO is both an art and a science, it’s something an insurance agency can do internally if there resources available, or that can be outsourced inexpensively. Regardless, prime page one Google SEO search results seem like they are worth the investment, as it is an insurance agency marketing gift that keeps on giving.

For more information, read Your Virtual Success (Career Press) http://www.YourVirtualSuccess.net or go to my website: http://www.startupselling.com. I’d love to hear about your insurance agency marketing and SEO efforts.

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