By Shannon Anderson, Account Manager

BizReport.com recently published an article by Helen Leggatt entitled “Family and friend recommendations no longer enough,” discussing consumer purchase behavior. According to Leggatt, “Despite only 2% of consumers saying they would put their trust in strangers, the vast majority would double-check a friend or relative’s product or service recommendation against the online opinions of, ironically, strangers.”

While gathering opinions from friends and family has always been an important step in the buying cycle, the article confirms that consumers are now seeking the online opinions of complete strangers. This additional step in the decision-making process has added an entirely new element to the buying cycle. Below are four ways your brand can leverage this important step.

1. Engage in Social Media. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are often used as a way to share brand opinions. Therefore, it is important to manage your brand’s reputation on these types of websites.

2. Encourage Conversation in Forums. Ask questions or post industry information that supports your brand. When using this tactic, it is essential to remain authentic and remove all jargon.

3. Be Present on Ratings Websites. Make sure your company is listed on these websites. Monitor the ratings and take feedback into consideration.

4. Quickly Address Concerns. Use public relations and social media outlets to promote your brand’s perspective before potentially negative issues become widespread.

For more information, contact 90octane.

Posted by: Shannon Anderson, Project Manager

When managed properly, company blogs are a great way to keep readers up to date on company and industry knowledge, and can be very useful in improving a company’s online visibility. Implementing the following optimization best practices can help improve both your blog and your website’s organic visibility within the search engines:

• Use a relevant keyword in your domain: When naming your blog, consider using an important keyword in your URL.

• Use relevant keywords in content: When writing content, consider common keywords and key phrases people would use to learn about your product(s) or industry. Include these keywords within your blog title and body copy with the most important keyword included in your title.

• Link to various pages of your website: Include links back to your website within your content to increase the number of incoming links to your website. Be sure to link to more than just your homepage.

• Include relevant anchor text: When linking to another page, use relevant keywords as your anchor text and hyperlink these accordingly.

• Submit to directories: There are many online directories where you can submit your blog to further increase its reach, such as BlogCatalog.com. This will increase the number of relevant back-links to your blog, increasing the importance placed on your blog by the search engines.

• Update frequently: Post content to your blog frequently so it does not go stagnant.

Try using these tips to improve your blog’s organic visibility within the search engines. Ultimately, they can help improve your website’s visibility as well.

Posted by: Shannon Denny, Project Manager

Google has recently launched a new feature for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising that inserts customized site links beneath the ads. At this time, this feature is readily available to PPC advertisers with high quality scores. Google allows advertisers to enter up to 10 sitelinks, and all sitelinks can point to different pages within the site. The higher the quality of the PPC ad, the more site links will be displayed. Below is an example of these sitelinks (highlighted in green) in action:

Sitelinks take up valuable real estate in the Google search results allowing advertisers to “own” the space which will likely lead to an increased click-through rate (CTR). As these links can be modified any time, it is a good idea to keep seasonality and new promotions in mind when planning them out.

Posted by: Shannon Anderson, Project Manager

As a fundamental building block to a search engine optimization (or SEO) program, it is important to build strong, qualified incoming links to your website. Here are a few ways to build these links and optimize visibility:

• Submit Press Releases: Submit keyword-rich press releases through newswires and online PR sites, such as PR Newswire and PR Leap, to gain increased online visibility.
• Submit to Directories: Directories, such as DMOZ, are a great way to submit links to your website building quality incoming traffic.

Posted by: Shannon Anderson, Project Manager

As one of the newest kids on the block, Bing is already making great strides in becoming a major player in the search engine world, frequently launching new features. Some of the newest include:

• Task-Focused Homepage allows users to select to search from various categories such as Shopping or Travel.
• Instant Answer returns the least expensive times to fly when users enter their travel specifications.
• Preview Feature has been made more visible and comprehensive than before.
• Event Search shows a summary of events in each city and can be filtered by category.
• Sharing Feature allows users to share their gift wishlists through Facebook and Twitter as well as email.
• Health, Medication and Hospital Results organizes information on health conditions, medications and hospitals to make it easier to find relevant results.

What do these advancements mean for your search engine marketing programs? Search is becoming increasingly personalized within Bing returning more relevant results to its users. Continuing to target your strategy and make use of these new features will definitely pay-off in this search engine. Other search engines, such as Google, appear to be increasing their emphasis on providing more relevant search results too.