Posted by: Janessa Seewald, Account Manager

Despite the tough economy and the fact that many companies are cutting portions of their budgets, most are maintaining their presence online and adopting an even more competitive, aggressive approach. The following tips can be utilized to help differentiate your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising/contextual advertising strategy from your competitors’.

1. Evaluate the messaging your competition is using within their PPC and contextual ads, and determine how to make your creative stronger. It’s got to really stand out. For example, use questions, customer testimonials and of course your strongest offer within your ad text.

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Posted by: Shannon Denny, Project Manager

It seems more than ever marketers are striving to make the most of their marketing bucks. If you’ve previously run search engine marketing (SEM) programs, one of the best ways to stretch your dollar is to evaluate your campaigns’ past performance. Here are a few questions to ask when optimizing your current SEM campaign:

·     What type of traffic did your previous campaign drive? If you were satisfied with the number and quality of the leads you were receiving, then it’s safe to assume you can continue down the same path; however, if the leads didn’t necessarily give you the results you were looking for, consider the strategy of your past campaign. For a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign, you may need to revisit the keyword strategy to determine what terms converted well. For an organic optimization (or SEO) program, see what position your website was showing up in, and try being more aggressive with any terms that aren’t performing to your expectations. read more »

Posted by: Leslie Russell, Senior Marketing Coordinator

Where has the time gone? It has been over a year since you last updated the metadata so important to your website’s search engine optimization (SEO), you can’t remember when the content on your site was last updated and some of your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising keywords seem a little stale. Now is the time to see which keywords have been performing, revamp your keyword list and get a refreshed search engine marketing strategy rolled out.

Start off by doing a little investigation on the success of your last keyword strategy.

Phase 1: Research

·      Review your site in-depth. Have you updated content or removed content? Are you keeping pace with trends in your industry?

·      Glance at your key competitors’ websites. Are they using different language and keywords throughout their content or metadata? Reviewing their sites may spark additional ideas for your keyword strategy. 

·      Pull analytics reports looking at non-paid and paid keywords.  Consider if all of these terms are still relevant, or if there are new terms you haven’t considered before.

·      Use keyword tools to gather recommendations of adjectives, synonyms, plurals, etc.

·      Take a look your organic and paid visibility. Are you getting exposure for the keywords you consider most important? If not consider how to make those words a higher priority in your refreshed keyword strategy. read more »

Posted by: Kelly Hall, Account Manager

Companies continue to utilize search engine marketing (SEM) to promote their products and services. Why? The simple fact is that prospects, as a result of the current economic conditions, are evaluating their purchasing decisions more closely than ever before.

In fact, prospects are now tasked with making smarter purchasing decisions. Faced with shrinking budgets, or simply calls to be more careful spenders, they are taking more steps to ensure that their purchases will 100% satisfy their business needs.  read more »

Posted by: Jessica Shepherd, Project Manager

The much anticipated day has finally arrived. Your company’s new product is officially launching. While this is a major feat in itself, many argue that the grueling work is only just beginning.

Marketing your product is a key factor for a successful launch, and the process should begin well before the actual launch date. An increasingly critical channel for product marketing is the Web. And while the ideal situation is to have top organic listings and major presence on the major search engines from Day 1, in most cases, this is just a pipe dream. read more »

Posted by: Brooke Caesar, Account Manager

Building the keyword list is the backbone to any successful search engine marketing campaign. If you target keywords that are too competitive, you end up chasing dreams of grandeur. If you target keywords that are too niche, you’ll get the results, but not the traffic. There are many steps in finding the right balance that will get the results and the traffic.

Begin your strategy by brainstorming keywords that are central to your organization and your audience. Once you have compiled a complete list, move onto what your competitors find important. One of the keys to creating that successful keyword strategy involves investigating what is central to your competitors’ strategy.

Review their meta data
What keywords are they using? How are they enticing people to come to their site (call to action)? Go to the competitors’ site and view their code. Take a look at the keywords that they think are beneficial by looking at their title, description and keyword tags. read more »

Posted by: Kayla Wagner, Project Manager

Are you a business that needs to come up in local searches? Here are some tips to make sure you’re covered and competitive:

1. On your site, make sure your address and contact information are listed in an easy-to-find location (perhaps the footer of every page) – and in proper HCard format! HCard format allows the search engine spiders to crawl your address and see it in a standard, easy to read format and import it into their map tools.

2. Do you have your location in your site content? You should! If you want to come up in search results for “Denver plumbers” you should have “Denver plumbers” in your site content. Not just plumbers and not just Denver or Colorado. Include relevant keywords to all areas of your purchase cycle including general terms (dentist), general + regional (dentist in denver), business name (Dr. Peters dental), and services (root canal). read more »