Some of you are sighing in relief. The last entry to the Top Ten Search Tips. Tip #10! I’ll keep this short: I’ve provided these search tips during some recent presentations and they were well-received by the participants. I thought it would be beneficial to post them here. I hope they’re able to help you in your search efforts.
Top 10 Search Tips – Tip #10 – Market, Market, Market – When all is said and done with respects to making a website as shiny as possible, there’s still work to be done in order to promote it. Just like traditional marketing is a never-ending cycle, so goes internet marketing. It has rapidly become an integrated and necessary channel of an organization’s overall marketing plan.
Every opportunity to promote a company’s URL – just like handing out a business card – should be taken advantage of. Basic opportunities are:
- Email Marketing – Generating a regular and readable newsletter keeps the company and the company’s website top-of-mind. If it’s the regular writing that gets in the way of publishing a newsletter, find someone to do it. Shameless plug – Alpine Technical Group is managing more and more internet marketing campaigns including the writing of regular newsletter articles.
- Blog – The same content created for the email newsletter can be published on a blog.
- Facebook – Create a group on Facebook for your company and publish the first snippet of the newsletter content. Entice readers to “read more”.
- Twitter – Tweet the substance of your Blog article and point to it. Actually when set up correctly, Twitter will feed your Facebook page.
- Yelp – We mentioned this before. Ensure your organization is well represented on Yelp. If it’s appropriate, beg customers to provide reviews on Yelp, Google, Bing etc. Remember though, it’s inappropriate (and usually apparent) for companies to review themselves.
All of these activities are work. But the dividends paid include keeping you top-of-mind with clients and prospects AND establishing you as a subject matter expert (SME) in your field. All of those links back to your website are great for achieving Tip #9
Measurement is difficult to come by in terms of ROI for internet marketing as well. One of the best ways to measure is to see what kind of website activity is generated before and after a particular event. Success comes from website visitors actually performing a task on your site. If it’s visiting a thank-you page after purchasing a product or filling out a form, those activities can be measured and attributable to internet marketing activities.
Also, the ever-pervasive “How did you hear about us?” is a perfect and immediate way to get marketing feedback.
Hopefully everyone has gained some sort of insight from these tips. Granted, they are pretty basic instructions but, if followed, they can produce great results.
Good Luck and Happy Webbing!
I used to call this tip “Don’t SCI Corp”. I can’t remember from where I learned about SCI Corp but I do remember the impact it had on me. Hopefully they’ve mended their ways by the time you read this but, for now, if you type “funeral and cemetary services” into your favorite search (or “decisioning” as MS calls Bing) engine, you won’t see SCI Corp anywhere in the first three pages of results. This is true even though, if SCI’s marketing copy is to be believed, they are one of the largest providers of funeral and cemetary services in the US. If you go to www.sci-corp.com and take a peek at the source code for the site, you’ll notice the basics of search, much less any structure, is breathtakingly absent. Maybe they don’t want the home website to result as well as their individual locations or brands.
