Google to Encrypt ALL Keyword Searches: What It Means for Your Inbound Marketing Efforts

cursorsGoogle is always tinkering with its algorithms and tools but the company recently phased in a big change that has millions of marketers and business owners talking: Going forward, 100 percent of all organic Google searches will now be covered by the engine’s secure search feature. While we could probably devote a whole thesis – and then some – to the subject, we want to break down what exactly it means for you.

[…]Read More

Local Marketing Online: Part 10: Optimized Web Design

A successful local marketing campaign is designed not only to attract your targeted audience but to convert them to customers. At some point in the process all potential and existing customers will visit your website. It is the most powerful online representative of your business – your virtual sales force working for you 24/7/365 to provide information, answer questions, solve some problems, and sell. A professional website is designed to greet, inform, assist, educate and motivate targeted site visitors that:

  • You have what they need
  • You provide quality products, services, information, care
  • You are professional
  • You are a trusted provider
  • Your business is sound and going to still be there in a week, month, year, etc.
  • You are customer-centric and will serve them the way they expect and need
  • You can answer their questions/concerns to their satisfaction
  • You are their best choice

That is a lot to accomplish when you are not speaking directly with a person and responding to specific questions and concerns. But your website must accomplish these challenges to the satisfaction of every site visitor who is a potential customer.

In the simplest of terms, the goal of your website is two-fold:

  1. Help existing and potential customers to get what they need from you by fulfilling the above listed items
  2. Help the search engines to get their users what they need by making it easy for them to scan, index and serve your optimized web pages as the most relevant results corresponding to the terms searched (i.e.: help them to do what they do with the highest standard of quality)

An optimized website refers to more than just search engine optimization. Yes, you do need to ensure that your web pages have content highly focused on the terms for which you want them to be delivered in a search engine result. As I explained in Part 2: Search & Social Media, the search terms you select must be the result of your comprehensive keyword research and development because they will be the foundation upon which your online authority will be built across multiple online platforms. They must accurately correspond to your content as well as the language used by your targeted audience groups to search for what you offer.

To recap, search engines aggregate information about your company from a wide variety of online sources, including blogs, social media, web listings, and so forth, looking for a confirmation of your identity and authority for the terms represented by your content. The terms you use in your optimization campaign for your website will be the same ones you use to confirm your identity and authority elsewhere online. Why is this important? Consider the two-fold goal of your website. You are trying to help customers and the search engines get what they want from you. So you must optimize for both. It starts with keywords but it doesn’t end there. Keeping the expectations and needs of both targeted site visitors and the search engines in mind, you must also plan, develop, and implement:

  • Relevant, highly focused content including text, images, meta data, title tags, urls and hyperlinks (internal, external, anchor, inline, crosslinks with web pages on different sites, attachments)
  • Ease of access, ease of use including graphical interface, navigation structure, design and programming code
  • Intelligent architecture that allows for expansion and further optimization
  • Relationship with all relevant off-site content

Optimized web design may be the most important component of your local marketing campaign because it is your virtual office or showroom ultimately designed to convert your targeted site visitors.

Think of yor website as the house and your marketing efforts as invitations to the party you are having at your house.

It makes no sense to invite people until you are properly prepared.

Thank you for reading my Local Marketing Online series. My objective is to always provide you with practical, easy-to-follow business development tips.  Please feel free to share any comments, questions, or experiences. And please share the posts with your friends and colleagues.

Read the Series:

Local Marketing Online: Part 1: Intro
Local Marketing Online: Part 2: Web & Map Listings
Local Marketing Online: Part 3: Google Place
Local Marketing Online: Part 4: Search & Social Media
Local Marketing Online: Part 5: City Sites, Reviews & Recommendations
Local Marketing Online: Part 6: Share Content
Local Marketing Online: Part 7: Email Marketing
Local Marketing Online: Part 8: Pay Per Click Integration
Local Marketing Online: Part 9: Mobile Marketing
Local Marketing Online: Part 10: Optimized Web Design

Local Marketing Online: Part 6: Share Content

In Part 5 of this series: City Sites, Reviews & Recommendations, I discussed the impact of customer reviews on your local marketing search results and your online authority. Just as reviews and ratings are a form of recommendation, sharing your optimized, highly focused and strategically developed content by posting it to other social media and networking sites also functions as a recommendation.

You will recall in Part 5 that I discussed the Facebook ‘Like’ button that allows users to share your content on Facebook with Friends in their social circle. There are similar tools that make it very easy for you and your targeted readers to share your content on a variety of social media platforms.

Share Buttons: There are many widgets and tools that you can have implemented on your web pages that allow you and your readers to do just as the tool implies: share your content with others by email or via a variety of popular social networking platforms. Two of the most commonly implemented tools are the ‘Share’ button developed and provided by AddToAny and the ‘ShareThis’ widget by ShareThis.com.  Simply by clicking on the desired destination, such as Digg or StumbleUpon, for example, you or your readers can post the content directly to the other platform for others to interact with. Typically you or your readers must register with the destination social media site first before having access to post content. Once registered, a simple process of identification and classification of the type of content being posted is all that’s required to share it with others.

It is to your advantage to register with all the social media sites you feel are likely to reach your targeted audience groups so that you too have the opportunity to share your optimized, highly relevant content. You probably invested a lot of time and money to develop the content so why not get the most mileage out of it that you can. If you have prepared your content the right way by making it topical and ensuring it contains the search terms that are part of your authority building strategy, then it is likely to be found by your targeted audience groups on the other social platforms as well. The more your content is accessed, commented on, and shared, the greater your authority score and your chances of achieving top rankings for the terms important to your strategy.

Here are some social networking sites you should consider registering for:

Digg
Reddit
Facebook
Twitter
Bebo
Google Buzz
StumbleUpon
MySpace
Orkut
Technorati Favorites
LinkedIn
DailyMe
FriendFeed

A lot of these sites have login associations with Facebook, Twitter, and a few other popular social networking sites. This allows you to use your already established login, say your Facebook login, to access some of these other platforms. One thing to keep in mind: it is important to separate your business and your social accounts so you can accurately monitor results. For example, if you use Twitter for yourself, either socially or professionally, then establish a separate account for your business to market and promote it. Be attentive when you are making posts that you post to the accounts associated with your business so you can develop Friends, Followers, and Subscribers that will help you to build your online authority and improve your search engine rankings.

Tweet: Exclusive to Twitter, the Tweet button can be implemented with your website, blog, and other social media content, allowing users to Tweet a link on their account to your content as well as make comments that are publicly viewable. The Tweet button also publicly displays the number of Tweets your content has received by other users. Many Twitter users have also linked their account with the professional networking platform LinkedIn, which means your content will appear on two platforms as a result of a single tweet.

Sharing content is a form of recommendation that works to build your online authority and improve your search listing results by demonstrating the interest others have in it.

In Part 7 of the Local Marketing Online series I will talk about email marketing and how you can strategically follow-up with reader interest to turn Followers into Customers.

Read the Series:

Local Marketing Online: Part 1: Intro
Local Marketing Online: Part 2: Web & Map Listings
Local Marketing Online: Part 3: Google Place
Local Marketing Online: Part 4: Search & Social Media
Local Marketing Online: Part 5: City Sites, Reviews & Recommendations
Local Marketing Online: Part 6: Share Content
Local Marketing Online: Part 7: Email Marketing
Local Marketing Online: Part 8: Pay Per Click Integration
Local Marketing Online: Part 9: Mobile Marketing
Local Marketing Online: Part 10: Optimized Web Design

Local Marketing Online: Part 5: City Sites, Reviews & Recommendations

When developing your local marketing strategy it’s important to include local city sites, the vast array of consumer review sites, and the variety of user recommendation tools in your marketing plan. The significance to you of these platforms and tools is the influence they have on your search listing results and your online authority.

As part of the paradigm shift away from the website owner and toward the website user, search engines are using consumer comments, reviews, star ratings, and the various voting tools such as the Facebook ‘Like’ button and Google’s +1 button, to identify and determine popular sources among users for information or shopping sites that are relevant to a user’s search. Once again, the idea is that what comes “straight from the horse’s mouth” is most reliable and hence, most relevant, to others searching for the same things. So the first thing to do is to ensure you can be found on the sites where your market research has determined your target audience groups spend time.

City and review sites are a hybrid of web directory and social networking.  These include CitySearch.com, Yelp.com, Foursquare.com, Local.com, Yahoo Local, Google Places, and many more. You are generally given the opportunity to ‘claim your listing’ (see Part 2: Web & Map Listings), select the categories appropriate to what you offer, and fill out your profile with your optimized contact information, description, and an image or two. The local aspect of your listing corresponds to the address of your physical location. Some of these sites will charge you a nominal yearly fee if you want to include a link to your website, additional images, and other profile items useful to marketing to your targeted audience groups. Depending on the volume of traffic the site gets relevant to your objectives, it may be worth budgeting for a few listing upgrades, particularly if you are targeting consumers.

Shopping sites and cart tools like Amazon.com and Google CheckOut, two of the many available, allow for customer reviews and ratings. Google CheckOut actively encourages users to provide a ‘1 to 5 Star Rating’ of their experience with the online merchant. Amazon solicits customer reviews, which are willingly provided as seen by the number of reviews available for items sold by the shopping site. These reviews and ratings are aggregated by search engines and not only factored into ranking of search results but often are attached to the search result via a link, making them readily available to users as they search. Particularly if you market to consumers, you may benefit greatly from the collective power of these online giants. As you have probably witnessed, Google groups relevant shopping results and posts them towards the top of the first page of the search results. The more popular your item is among consumers and the better their online shopping experience was with you, the more likely your item will appear in the top listings for relevant searches.

Recommendation tools such as Google’s recently introduced ‘+1’ button and Facebook’s ‘Like’ button are simple ways for users to recommend your products, services, or company simply by clicking the button. The Facebook ‘Like’ button is a tool that you can have implemented on your other web content such as your website, blog pages, and other social media posts. The Google ‘+1’ button works much the same way. Acting as a counter that tallies the number of ‘votes’ your content has received, the Google ‘+1’ and Facebook ‘Like’ buttons provide information to users and search engines about the number of people who have recommended your content. Although the recommended content on the Facebook and Google platforms is accessible to users within the social circle of the person who made the recommendation, the Facebook ‘Like’ button offers the additional benefit of sharing your content on its platform as well. Obviously the more recommendations you get the better the overall effect on your search ranking and traffic results.

The lesson to take away here is that the opinions of others matter not just to consumers but to the search engines as well. Users now have an easy way to share their experiences with limitless others online. So you better make sure your website and all the content you present meets their needs and demanding expectations. The power of word-of-mouth via these numerous recommendation and rating sites and tools affects your online business results now more than ever before. You want to be present and encourage positive customer response. Good or bad, online word-of-mouth spreads faster than a bush fire in California on a hot August afternoon!

In Part 6 of the Local Marketing Online series I will talk about how you can Share Content and encourage your targeted readers to do the same as part of your strategy to boost your online authority and rankings.

Read the Series:

Local Marketing Online: Part 1: Intro
Local Marketing Online: Part 2: Web & Map Listings
Local Marketing Online: Part 3: Google Place
Local Marketing Online: Part 4: Search & Social Media
Local Marketing Online: Part 5: City Sites, Reviews & Recommendations
Local Marketing Online: Part 6: Share Content
Local Marketing Online: Part 7: Email Marketing
Local Marketing Online: Part 8: Pay Per Click Integration
Local Marketing Online: Part 9: Mobile Marketing
Local Marketing Online: Part 10: Optimized Web Design

Local Marketing Online: Part 4: Search & Social Media

Search and social media offer you great local marketing opportunities for branding and lead generation if you understand the new search paradigm and strategize accordingly. The leading search engines, namely Google and Bing, are now aggregating information from a variety of online sources to help determine the indexing and ranking of web pages not only for local search but for all search.
Chief among these sources are quality social media sites, which are platforms where real people talk about their knowledge of and experiences with products, services, companies, and people. The idea is that information that comes “straight from the horse’s mouth” is reliable and hence relevant to others searching for the same things. Not only is this information being used as criteria for ranking but it is also appearing in the search results.

By aligning your search engine optimization initiatives with your social media initiatives you are setting the stage for building your authority online for the terms that correspond to the content you present, namely information about who you are and what you offer. For example, if you a recruiter for top executives, you want to establish your online authority for the principle terms that clearly identify you with that service as well as correspond to the terms used by your target audience groups to search for what you offer. (Good “old fashioned” keyword research is key here)

If you have been following this series you will begin to see that the connecting threads that weave your online ‘identity’ and ‘authority’ fabric are keywords. All of the highly focused content that you develop and present on your website and all social media platforms must contain the keywords you have carefully selected from your comprehensive research and analysis. These keywords must accurately reflect
a) the content you present and
b) the language used by your targeted audience groups to search for what you offer.

The idea, as I will continue to state throughout this series, is to establish and maintain consistency across the internet so you are easily and accurately identified. The way in which to build your authority is to continue to develop and present highly focused content that speaks to the current interests of your targeted audiences. That means you have to produce new and engaging content on a regular basis. The best strategy is to develop a schedule of delivery that you are willing and able to stick to.

The formula for developing your audience – acquiring Facebook ‘Friends,’ Twitter ‘Followers,’ or blog subscribers, for example – is to present content at least once a week, but preferably twice a week or more depending on the platform and your strategy, that capitalizes on known trends and popular topics among your targeted groups. This content should invite comments, questions, or even shared experiences. In other words, you don’t want to speak at your audience you want to speak with them. Better yet, give them the opportunity to speak to you!

Bottom line – align your search and social media efforts. Ensure that the right hand is working together with the left to create and deliver topical content that contains the keywords and phrases for which you want to be a recognized authority.

In Part 5 of the Local Marketing Online series I will talk about City Sites, Reviews & Recommendations and how they can help to boost your online authority and rankings.

Read the Series:

Local Marketing Online: Part 1: Intro
Local Marketing Online: Part 2: Web & Map Listings
Local Marketing Online: Part 3: Google Place
Local Marketing Online: Part 4: Search & Social Media
Local Marketing Online: Part 5: City Sites, Reviews & Recommendations
Local Marketing Online: Part 6: Share Content
Local Marketing Online: Part 7: Email Marketing
Local Marketing Online: Part 8: Pay Per Click Integration
Local Marketing Online: Part 9: Mobile Marketing
Local Marketing Online: Part 10: Optimized Web Design