We must always keep this in mind as we develop web pages, PPC ad copy, landing pages and even printed advertisements that may apply to the current promotion. Successful online conversion works backwards from the desired action that potential clients/customers should take and ensures that every step of the way, for every link in the chain and step in the process of discovering a wonderful product or service, your messages maintain the same information “scent.” The word “scent” helps clarify what is we are attempting to maintain and what purpose it serves for your prospects.

Trigger Cues and Key Elements

When crafting a successful online conversion campaign, provide trigger cues, such as words, graphics, colors and the consistent positioning of key elements to make it easy for prospects to continue on the desired path and instill greater confidence at every stage.

For instance, if the point-of-action on a landing page is a button that moves the user forward, whatever page they arrive at next should contain an obvious “next step” found in the same location as the button the user just clicked (or as close as possible to that place on the page), where their attention is still fixed. Additionally, as soon as you have chosen a contrasting, high-visibility color to use when depicting a call-to-action, be sure not to deviate from that color as the online conversion process continues. Take care not to introduce competing elements in close proximity to these crucial steps during the process of leading your prospects to the goal — whether it is a sale or simply the creation of a qualified lead.

PPC Trigger Words

Trigger words are most critical when linking Pay-Per-Click ads to the content that sells your products/services to the user. During each campaign, there are specific words that initially motivate the prospect to begin the online conversion process. If these words are not consistent throughout the process you will lose a percentage of your potential sales every time it happens.

The landing page that results from clicking on a PPC ad must contain the same verbiage that was in the ad; specifically, the name of the product or service, which should be in the language of the customer – not your own industry jargon. This online conversion recommendation seems obvious; however, it is violated everywhere you look.

Aesthetic Consistency

If you use a picture of a gecko in your banner ad, use a picture of a gecko on the page that it links to and then on every successive page displayed throughout the process. Graphics, including background textures, page section dividers, call-to-action buttons, offer stars, trust seals and badges must be consistent across all elements and channels. Successful online conversion techniques even consider the fonts and formatting of headlines and other copy when creating all of the various pieces involved. Do not allow silos in your marketing department/team inhibit this consistency. Finally, study the effects of color on human psychology and try to incorporate what you have gleaned about the influence of specific colors on website visitors. Above all, keep your colors consistent.

In this competitive environment with dwindling attention spans, if you promise something in an advertisement or any type of published content, you should deliver on your promise by asking the least amount of effort possible from the user; otherwise, your online conversion campaign will be in vain, and your marketing materials will be abandoned at an alarming rate with your ROI going down the drain.

Atlanta-based search engine optimization company Medium Blue is pleased to announce its nomination for an American Marketing Association Atlanta Marketer of the Year (AMY) award, for the sixth time in six years. Based on Medium Blue’s comprehensive search engine optimization (SEO) campaign for client Mitchell Metals, the Atlanta chapter of the American Marketing Association (AMA) named Medium Blue a finalist for the third year in a row, in the category of “Search Engine Optimization.”

Click to continue reading “Medium Blue Search Engine Optimization Company Named a Finalist for 2012 American Marketing Association Award“

So does this mean that you should jump on a computer ASAP and begin posting Facebook status updates as if your life depends on it? And, if you currently work with a search engine optimization company, does this mean that you should call them repeatedly, until they have established a Facebook page for your business?

If you ask the fine folks at Facebook, they’ll probably tell you that the entirety of your time and budget should be spent on social media optimization. However, the answer truly depends on a number of varying factors. Can your business benefit from social media optimization? Let’s find out.

Social Media Optimization: Who is your Audience?

An experienced search engine optimization company will tell you that one of the most important aspects to successful social media optimization is identifying your target audience. Although it seems as if everyone has a Facebook page these days, some businesses are inherently more Facebook-friendly than others.

For example, if you are a B2C clothing chain, Facebook could potentially be a great place to garner your social presence and build a rapport within the community. Facebook enables you to interact with consumers and provide personalized customer service as well as useful information, including details about upcoming sales and new products.

However, if you are a B2B widget company, the widget purchasing managers you want to reach may not typically browse Facebook for a new widget vendor. Further, you might find that most Facebook users think your “informative” widget status updates are incredibly boring.

A knowledgeable search engine optimization firm can help you determine if your business actually has a  target audience on Facebook. Further, a search engine optimization company can help you determine whether or not you can consistently produce the amount of interesting content it takes to stay relevant — or they can assist with content production and social media optimization.

Can You Produce Interesting Content?

In a perfect world, you would create a Facebook page, everybody would click the “Like” button, and your business would reach a whole new audience via collective friend networks. However, as you’ve probably learned, social media optimization is not typically this easy. Unfortunately, that remains true in the realm of social media optimization, and many businesses find themselves helplessly falling into the abyss of Facebook irrelevance as a result.

Sure, you can beg friends and family to provide those first few “Likes” and to get the fire started, but afterward, the only way to progress your social media optimization campaign is by creating interesting, useful content that keeps Facebook users coming back for more (which their friends will see in the form of status updates).

If you are in the wrong business for Facebook social media optimization, no amount of “How to Get ‘Likes’” blogs or webinars will change the fact that your industry is probably not destined for Facebook success; however, this only means that you should concentrate your resources elsewhere in your search engine optimization efforts.

Time and Budget

Assuming you do have a business that is marketable on Facebook, creating a business page is easy and can be done within a matter of minutes, even without the assistance of a search engine optimization firm; although, you should be aware that this is by far the least time-consuming step in the social media optimization process.

It would be easy to fill out your company’s profile information and to simply “complete” the process of setting up your organization’s Facebook page – but unless your company is already a household name, users will not rush to your Facebook page like shoppers flock to a department store on Black Friday.

It is quite common to see Facebook business pages that have garnered under 100 “Likes.” When there are companies with over 39 million “Likes,” this can make your page appear as if it is a ghost town. As you can imagine, the sight of tumbleweeds is never particularly attractive, even if those tumbleweeds are digital. You don’t typically hear anyone exclaim, “Let’s go to that restaurant down the street! The one that’s always empty when we pass by.”

Even if you or your search engine optimization company are successful in building an online following, a Facebook business page merits that same lecture you might have received when you were given a childhood pet. This page and the social media optimization process required to make the page successful, are both a long-term responsibility. In order to be successful on Facebook, you must be willing to take care of your company’s page from now until the end of time (or at least until the next dominant platform arrives).

Should I Start a Facebook Business Page?

Should you start a Facebook business page or pay a search engine optimization company to manage a Facebook presence on your behalf? Unfortunately, there is no magical answer — it depends on a variety of factors.

The best approach you can take is to figure out what kind of business you are (e.g. B2C and B2B), and to determine how likely your business is to attract visitors and communicate with users frequently. If you do have a product or service that can be made interesting to the average consumer, determine whether or not you have the long-term time and/or budget to continually manage Facebook social media optimization. If you are a business with a specialized B2B product or service, you should keep in mind that that this does not necessarily lend well to Facebook success and that you’re probably better off focusing your search engine optimization attempts elsewhere.

If you need help determining whether your business is Facebook-friendly, or if you need assistance creating or boosting your online presence, it is always a good idea to consult an experienced search engine optimization company.

Establishing Your Social Media Presence: LinkedIn Company Page Contents

In order to best establish your social media presence, you must become familiar with the contents of a robust LinkedIn page. LinkedIn company pages have four tabs, three of which are visible to users, and an analytics tab visible only to administrators of the company page.

• Overview: This tab contains an introduction to your business and basic information about the company. Your overview also enables you to further establish your social media presence by integrating your Twitter and Blog feeds, providing visitors with access to more information and opportunities to engage with your company. This area will also give your visitors the opportunity to follow your company, receive updates and interact with your business.
• Careers: This tab, available to those with paid LinkedIn memberships, contains job postings within your company.
• Products and Services: Perhaps one of the most powerful tools on LinkedIn, this tab allows you to share what your company has to offer.
• Analytics: This tab allows those with administrator access to your LinkedIn company page to view statistics about this page, including pageviews, both overall and by tab, the number of unique visitors per month, and the number of clicks that each link on the “Products and Services” tab receives.

What Are the Benefits of a LinkedIn Company Page?

Just last month, LinkedIn announced it had reached 150 million members. And unlike some of the other major social networking platforms, LinkedIn’s membership is comprised of professionals, a number of which are bound to be in your target audience. A LinkedIn company page gives you the opportunity to establish your social media presence, share your company’s story and describe what your company has to offer, as well as engage with its network of followers.

Possibly the most important benefit of a LinkedIn company page is the “Products and Services” tab. This tab allows you to promote your products and/or services, and it allows LinkedIn members to recommend and share your offerings within their network.

Creating an Optimized LinkedIn Company Page in Five Steps

Step 1: Log into LinkedIn. Under the “Companies” tab in the main navigation, select your company from the drop-down menu. You may be surprised and find there is already a page created for your company. If any company employees use a valid company email address on LinkedIn, you will already have a company page.

Step 2: Set up the administrators of your company’s page. You can grant all of your employees (with a company email address) access to these pages or you can choose to allow administrative access to only specific employees.  If you do decide to designate specific individuals as administrators, be sure to include yourself as a designated administrator.

Tip:

• By designating specific individuals as administrators, they will have the ability to post company status updates, which can be used to boost your LinkedIn social media presence, share information about the company or engage within the company’s network.

Step 3: Flesh out the “Overview” tab with your basic company information. This includes basic information required by LinkedIn, such as the company’s name, website, industry and company description. We highly-encourage you to add optional content to your company page, such as a company logo, the year founded, company specialties, its Twitter handle, and the company’s RSS feed. While these items are optional, in order to establish a robust social media presence on LinkedIn, we strongly recommend including this and additional information.

Tips:

• Write a company description that includes your organization’s targeted keywords and specialties. Include the most important information or even a call-to-action toward the top of the description. For example, if it is important for a visitor to visit the “Products and Services” tab to view what your company has to offer, say so, and say it sooner rather than later.
• Treat the “company specialties” area as a place to list targeted industry-specific keyphrases about your company and its products and services. If a potential customer searches LinkedIn, what words and phrases might they use to find you?
• If you have a blog, and if you or your employees update the blog regularly, that is fantastic! Add your company’s RSS feed so that your posts are automatically shared on your LinkedIn company page. These posts will gain more visibility and reach, boosting your social media presence without any additional effort.

Step  4: Opt to display company news. Enabling this feature will allow relevant posts and press releases to be automatically posted to your company page, integrating your social media presence and providing visitors and followers with additional information about your company. There might be some trepidation from a reputation management standpoint about having company news automatically posted to LinkedIn; however, in general, opting to showing news is recommended.

Step 5: Complete the “Products and Services” tab. This tab might take the most time to complete, but this is a relatively easy and extremely valuable opportunity to boost your LinkedIn social media presence by allowing media-rich content that be used to drive traffic to your website and gain new business. To set up this feature, click “Add a product or service” on the “Products and Services” tab and fill out all the required information, including category, name and description. While the other information might be optional, it is best to treat these areas as requisites in order to complete an informative, enticing product page with links directly to your site. When you have completed the information, click “Publish.” Repeat these steps for all other products and services.

Tips:

• Upload photos and videos, if available, to each specific product or service page. This creates more engaging content to inform a visitor about each of your company offerings.
• Include outbound links to important landing pages on your site, and feature a download or product offer, such as a whitepaper or product spec sheet, to provide the visitor with an opportunity to engage with your company, which may potentially convert visitors into customers.
• You also have the ability to add banners to your product pages. These banners should be eye-catching, 640×220 pixel (or some ratio of that number) images that are linked to a product or landing page with a contact form.

Congratulations! You Now Have an Optimized LinkedIn Company Page!

Now, the next steps are to build a network of followers to boost your LinkedIn social media presence and to consistently engage with this network.  This is an ongoing process with a few key steps:

• Promote your company within your own LinkedIn network to increase followers.
• Follow and interact with company pages that might lead to potential business.
• Encourage current and past customers to follow and engage with your company by posting testimonials and reviews on your products and/or services.
• Company page administrators should regularly post company status updates. If only one person is an administrator, we recommend initially setting a goal to post approximately three status updates a week. If this is divided amongst a group of employees, a schedule of posting twice a day might be feasible and ideal. Include company news, links to relevant articles, and even some fun updates (like an employee “Happy Birthday” shout-out) that provide visitors with a look at your company’s “human side.” Try to include target keywords and phrases in these updates whenever possible.

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What is a Link Farm?

A link farm is basically a collection of webpages that all hyperlink to each other in an effort to create as many backlinks as possible and take advantage of search engine algorithms, such as a Google PageRank. In a traditional and effective link building campaign, you should search for quality backlinks and reciprocate just as selectively.

For example, if you are a local hardware store, you might dream of one day receiving a backlink from a nationwide hardware chain. Therefore, when it comes to providing backlinks to other websites, it would be odd for your hardware store’s website to exchange links with a dog cosmetics company. However, in a link farm there is no filter as to where your backlinks come from or for the websites for which you provide links. As a result, link farming is now considered a black hat practice and you run the risk of severe penalization, which may result in your website’s removal from the Google index. Therefore, another tip to maintaining a quality link building campaign is to decide whether or not a potential backlink or outside link is relevant to your industry. As a hardware company, it is definitely logical to network with a building materials company or various tool vendors, but if you are asked to link with a variety of companies that have nothing to do with each other or your industry, the chances are that you might be associating with a link farm.

Google PageRank

At base, Google PageRank is a search engine algorithm that ranks webpages based upon their importance. Every backlink to your website is equivalent to a vote of support, so you might assume that the goal is merely to obtain as many votes as possible. However, while it is true that every quality backlink builds your website’s PageRank (I stress, quality), the system is, unfortunately, not that cut-and-dry. To put it simply, all votes are not created equal, and obtaining backlinks from one website with a high PageRank can potentially be more influential than the combined backlinks from any number of low-ranking sites. There are numerous websites and browser toolbars that are easily obtainable via a Google search, perfect for utilization when determining the PageRank of a potential backlink. These are great tools for determining which websites you want to target during your link building campaign. Every page is ranked on a scale from 1 to 10 — the larger the number, the better the PageRank. As a general rule, a higher Google PageRank means that a website is more likely to be trusted; however, you should still be wary of link farms.

Identifying and Avoiding a Link Farm

We have touched upon a few ways to avoid a link farm, including paying attention to the trust value of Google PageRank and maintaining selective, relevant backlinks. However, there are several other common giveaways you should look out for when identifying a link farm. First, unlike online directories that might be industry specific and offer some form of categorization, link farms most stereotypically are portrayed as an extensive list of links with little or no attention to page design or detail. Another potential giveaway is the lack of website content or an apparent site function, such as a product, service or even informative materials. A link farm is strictly a tool meant for building search engine rankings, which means that individuals maintaining link farms typically do not focus on creating aesthetically pleasing website elements to house their links, and it is not uncommon to see a “bare bones” link farm website design.

White Hat Link Building Procedures

During your link building initiatives, remember that it’s not easy to create an effective link building campaign. Walking the line between white and black hat procedures can be a tricky process, as search engine TOS change over time. If you have the budget, it’s always a good idea to consult an experienced internet marketing and search engine optimization company for link building inquiries and strategies, as they most often know how to identify link farms and other black hat practices that may otherwise lower your PageRank or result in your website’s removal from search engine results.

Although black hat tactics may garner great results initially, utilizing these methods is similar to not paying your taxes and hoping the IRS won’t catch you. Of course, the argument can be made that not many sites get penalized for using black hat SEO methods. But do you really want to chance it? I don’t know of any site that can afford penalization for violating search engine guidelines, especially on the monster known as Google!

Additionally, on that same note, your black hat SEO methods could be in danger of being “outed” by credible, well-known sites and news sources, such as the New York Times, for not following search engine guidelines to uphold quality. The New York Times wrote a piece exposing jcpenney’s link building black hat tactics after discovering that thousands of low-quality links pointed to their website, jcpenney.com. Soon after, similar articles began popping up – just do a search for the keyphrases “overstock” and “paid links” for evidence.

Now, you may think you are in the clear if you have conducted black hat tactics and have not yet been “caught.” However, your competitors, who may be jealous of your rankings, could potentially examine your site to determine which SEO methods you used to achieve these results. There are free and paid tools available to determine which tactic is used – on or off of a site. If your competitors used these tools on your site, and found that you are in violation of search engine guidelines, they could potentially report you to those credible news sources, like the New York Times.

Our SEM firm, Medium Blue, has told our clients for years to avoid having duplicate content on websites. No matter how much time it takes or how much money it costs to write content, website copy should be uniquely-written (and hopefully, optimized) content that is unique from page-to-page on your site as well as from other sites. Our white hat SEO methods used to get so much pushback from clients and other SEO companies regarding our approach to copy; however, we continued to promote this recommendation because a website containing duplicate content is similar to paying for links – both black hat tactics are against many search engines’ guidelines.

Thankfully, “sticking to our guns” and continuing to promote SEO methods that utilized only unique content ended up paying off.  Earlier this year it hit. Google rolled out PANDA 1.0 in February 2011, which penalized sites for having duplicate content. Since the original PANDA algorithm, several more versions were rolled out to continue to “clean up” Google from sites that used black hat tactics, such as duplicate content.

The bottom line is, search engine guidelines have been around for a long time and are easily available on each respective search engines’ site. If you want to gamble your site’s success and engage in black hat tactics in order to receive a boost in rankings, your site may ultimately suffer in the long run. I doubt link building schemes and duplicate content penalizations are the end of Google’s (and other search engine’s) attempts to “clean up” the web. Do you really want to jeopardize the future of your site? Is it really worth it? No — especially when you can achieve the same results with white hat SEO methods!

On the flip side, if you are in the market for an SEO firm and/or are implementing internet marketing recommendations to your site, be sure to ask questions, such as “Are these recommendations aligned with the search engine guidelines?” If not, you may want to reevaluate the recommendations… or even your SEO firm.

“Editing an ad will delete the original version: Changing your ad text, modifying the content of your ad, or moving your ad to another ad group will delete the original ad and create a new ad version. The new ad’s statistics will begin at zero. It is not possible to resume an ad once you have deleted it.
If you’re not certain whether you’re ready to delete the ad, try creating a new ad first and pause the original version. Allow the new ad to run within the same ad group and compare the performance for both ads.”

If you have extensive experience in managing PPC accounts, you are aware that Google Adwords rarely says anything definitive about account management. As a whole, Google Adwords does not often tell us what or what not to do within our PPC accounts, but oftentimes, it does supply us with clues and tips. The above paragraphs were highlighted in yellow, accompanied with a yellow exclamation point, which tells us that we should pay attention to these recommendations. To read the complete Google Adwords Help page, click here.

What Happens if I Edit PPC Ad Copy or Delete the Existing Ads in an Ad Group?

If you edit or delete the existing PPC ad copy in an ad group, you lose any historical CTR that the ad group has currently earned. According to Google Adwords Help, one of the core components of Quality Score is “the historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group.” Deleted ads may still carry some Quality Score for the ad group, but after reading Google’s words of wisdom, I wouldn’t take the chance.

It may be a pain to pause an ad, copy and paste it, and then edit the ad, but it will help your overall Quality Score in the long run. And if you find out that the old PPC ad copy converts better than the new ads, you can simply unpause it.

1. Rising mobile search usage leads to growing visibility opportunities in local/map search.
2. Major search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo! collectively agree to support the www.schema.org webpage markup language for structured data.
3. Despite alliances, all three major search engines still compete for your data.

Put together the puzzle pieces of an expanding online market, new standards in search engine technology, and a clear division between how each search engine will pursue this mobile market to reveal a mobile SEO strategy for your website.  This article provides the data and rationale behind mobile search marketing. The goal is to provide optimally structured data to search engines — data that search engines compete to obtain and provide to an expanding mobile internet market.

Rising Mobile Search Usage

The steady rise in mobile search usage indicates that now is the time to invest in mobile SEO to prepare for the coming dominant internet. Last year, Gartner, Inc. research predicted that by the year 2013, mobile phones would overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide:

Context will center on observing patterns, particularly location, presence and social interactions. Furthermore, whereas search was based on a ‘pull’ of information from the Web, context-enriched services will, in many cases, prepopulate or push information to users.

Morgan Stanley Research published a similar timeline, explaining that mobile internet users will outnumber desktop users accessing the internet in 2013.  Other predictions indicate mobile search overtaking desktop search from as early as 2012 to as late as 2015.

This is why utilizing mobile SEO is necessary. Search engines pull data from your website and then push that information to users based on the search query.  They have been evolving to provide modified search results based on a visitor’s context.  In 2007, Google began producing blended search results, called “universal search,” and in 2009, the search engine began integrating rich snippets from videos, images, news, maps and books into its results.  In 2008, Yahoo! began hosting SearchMonkey developer parties to introduce web developers to its rich snippet code which provides data for blended search results.  In 2010, Bing referred to itself as the “Decision Engine,” providing similar blended rich snippets tailored to search intent.

The inclusion of rich snippets depends on the keyword query, and the algorithms that serve the snippets are affected by the context of user location.  Search engines assume that certain keywords are utilized with the searcher’s intent to discover information, while other keywords are utilized when the search intent is to find a location.  The searcher’s location, identified by IP address or GPS, allows rich snippets to become customized according to geo-location, and  all of the major search engines serve up authoritative, keyword-relevant local results closest to the user’s location.

Google, Bing and Yahoo! Agree on Structured Data Format

On June 2, 2011, Google, Bing and Yahoo! announced their initiative to support a common set of schemas for structured data markup.  What is structured data markup? A “markup” is website code – for example, “HTML” stands for Hypertext Markup Language.  Structured data refers to data that is already categorized and can be imported into a database.  Search engines pull this structured data into their specific databases for recipes, videos, products, events, reviews, people, organization, and etc.  These databases are indexed and served as rich snippets in search results. Data for events, organizations and reviews are fed into Google Places pages and help optimize for local/map search results from a desktop or mobile device.

Search engines are constantly crawling the internet, attempting to decipher individual items that can be added to these specific databases. Using the schema markup to tag items on your webpages will structure the data in a way that is accepted by all major search engines.  In many cases, existing data on your website is already present – it just needs to be tagged.

By adopting a common schema, we can conclude that search engines have agreed to make it easy for themselves to gather structured data from websites.

Google, Yahoo! and Bing Are Competing for Your Data

Despite the Bing/Yahoo! search alliance and the cooperative adoption of schema.org, all three search engines are still collecting and displaying structured data independently. Bing may be supplying Yahoo! web search results, but Yahoo! inserts its own rich snippets. The latest search market share from StatOwl indicates that Yahoo! and Bing are head-to-head in generating search traffic. Google, Yahoo! and Bing each maintain a separate database for maps, as well as images, video, news, and so on).

Furthermore, each search engine maintains a unique approach to attract and provide a user-friendly experience to visitors.  Google’s mission remains centered on providing a deep-crawl and relevant search results to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”  Bing, the “decision engine,” makes an assumption about a visitor’s search intent and attempts to surrounds him/her with all possible points-of-action that he/she may wish to take during that particular search. Yahoo! maintains a traditional community portal experience, providing prominent gateways to news stories, videos, chat, browsing, shopping, dating, and more.  Each of these search engine experiences rely on pulling structured data to serve rich snippets based on perceived user search intent.

Local and Mobile SEO Opportunities

If your website is not written with HTML 5, microdata format or schema.org vocabulary to tag content for rich snippets, you are not making the most of your mobile SEO opportunities, meaning that you are lacking in visibility in mobile and local search results.  Marketing scare tactics aside, this is a new adaptation of technology.  Elliot Nix, Google Senior Account Executive of the Mobile Ads Team, revealed at the Mobile Search Marketing event in Atlanta on March 31, 2011 that according to Google internal information, 79% of advertisers do not have a mobile SEO landing page.  Now is the time to begin utilizing mobile SEO opportunities. Because you may not be behind your competitors at the moment —  but this is your chance to be ahead of the game.

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