Is reputation monitoring important in my case? The question really isn't "Is it important?", but: "How important?". Let's look at some stats: 90% of business purchases start online - Forrester (and that was 2007!) 83% of businesses use the Internet to research and find potential vendors - Enquire: Business to Business Survey 84% of consumers surveyed said that browsing reviews influenced their decision on whether or not to purchase a product or service. - Opinion Research Corporation If you are a capital management firm investing millions of dollars of clients' ...

Before reading this blog: This blog assumes you know the basics of how Pay-Per-Click increases website traffic. If you are not sure what Pay-Per-Click is, please read "The Difference Between SEO and Pay-Per-Click" first. Google Adwords reaches the most people. Yahoo Search Marketing is #2. MSN Search Marketing is #3. Start with Google Adwords. Look before you leap. Formulate your ROI equation to estimate investment and return. It may look something like this: I want ____ new customers per month from Pay-Per-Click. x historical sales conversion rate of __% = we ...

First, let's clarify what Local Search is and is not: Local Search is where your business is listed on a directory by location, or listed in "local" results on search engines - like when someone searches for "web design company in warsaw, indiana". Local Search is not the same as natural search engine rankings or Pay-Per-Click advertising. What are the benefits of being listed? Being "everywhere" contributes to your website's credibility in the eyes of Google and other regular search engines. Thus, it tends to improve your natural search engine rankings over the next 6 ...

Customers decide if they're open to working with you within a split second of seeing your homepage. Could you get more leads out of the traffic you're already getting? Take 15 minutes today and ask 3 people outside your organization to go to your homepage and answer these 3 questions: What do we do? Who are we for? What does one do next? If you pick people not familiar with your organization, you'll be able to rate your site's effectiveness by their answers. Like anything else, there are exceptions. Perhaps your target audience is so narrow that only your specific audience will ...

Let's take a look at the search engine landscape. The objective here is to understand where focus your marketing efforts. Which search engines do people use? 86% Google 6% Bing 5% Yahoo 2% AOL 1% Ask These numbers have been averaged over the past 6 months (November 2009 through April 2010). We've not included the "Other" category because it's less than 1% and these numbers have been rounded. Source: StatOwl What's the story on each? Google continues to grow and weave together it's various search venues like Maps, Products, Images, Twitter, News. There's no end in ...

Many companies are not aware of the full gamut of search engine optimization (SEO) methods that build long-term reputation and ranking.  Are you aware of the more advanced SEO methods beneath the surface - waiting to be leveraged? You may reevaluate your strategy after reading this blog. First of all, let's make sure we're on the same page: You never pay a search engine for ranking (You do with Pay-Per-Click however. Learn about the difference between SEO and PPC here.) Effect's definition of search engine optimization: The process of proactively influencing the growth of your ...

Marketing Professionals are trying to size up and evaluate every potentially relevant new marketing channel the web produces. The purpose of this blog is to help marketing professionals cut to heart of what they need to know about Google Buzz. Facts Google Buzz was released February 2010. It's a Social Media tool geared for sharing information, including photos and videos. Currently, a person must have a Gmail (Google Mail) account to use Google Buzz. This may change in the future. The biggest differences Google Buzz has over Facebook: Fused to your Gmail email address If you ...

We asked Linked In members of the "Marketing Executives Group": What's the #1 thing you need to figure out about the web? Over 100 marketing professionals responded. We've sifted through all the responses to group and quantify them into an insightful list. Here are the top things marketing professionals want to figure out about the web in descending order: Understand who your target audiences are and how they see and use the web. How to measure ROI. Have a strategy for how the web should work in the overall marketing plan. How to leverage Social Media effectively. How to ...

Large consumer giants like Coke and Unilever are switching up their digital strategy again. According to a recent article from New Media Age, Coca-Cola and Unilever are shifting their digital focus away from traditional campaign sites and towards community platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, as social media begins to dictate their marketing activity in 2010. This move comes as no surprise as many companies are now relying on full-throttle, web strategies and not just a corporate website. Microsites will not be eliminated completely, but rather serve as a method to drive users ...

We recently published a white paper for marketing executives who want to understand the risks and consequences associated with not fully embracing the web. As the web has become the central hub of all communications, no longer can marketing executives afford to take a casual approach to the web by relying on an ineffective corporate website. Rather a full-throttle, all-encompassing web strategy must be in place in order for a business to grow. A holistic web strategy includes components like social media, search engine optimization, video and multimedia, campaign based micro-sites, email ...