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Archive for the ‘SEO Consulting’ Category

July 8th, 2010

Posted in
Search Engine Optimization (seo), SEO Consulting

Competitive Market Research: Using Google Insights

A competitive intelligence report is one of the first items that we create for our new clients. Gaining a perspective about how an industry is doing online — and what competitors are up to — is invaluable.

Competitive intelligence will give us guidance on how to proceed — what items should take priority with our time and focus in an internet marketing campaign.

Once more, clients love (and when I say love, I mean they perk up during conference calls and pepper us with questions) to hear what their dread competitors are up to. Competitive intelligence will often produce little nuggets that can prompt wider changes in a client’s operations — such as product development, customer service and branding. Here are some scenarios that can occur when you present a competitive intelligence report to your bosses:

a) Your client, a travel agency is informed that its rival is spending a lot of time and energy in marketing African Safari packages. That sparks a discussion among the sales staff about investigating the demand for this service and how to create an alternative African safari package that is marketed online.

b) A competitive intelligence report shows that a rival countertop dealer is focusing its sales efforts on mobile home dealers and repair shops. In order to differentiate the client’s services from its rival, the client decides to focus its sales efforts on owners of new homes.

There are plenty of tools out there to use to gleam data for online competitive intelligence reports for our online marketing clients. I first head to the Google insights tool to give me some ideas. The initial search box allows you to target search trends by geography, time, search type and topic category. In this example, I wanted to see how different keywords that the ArcherSEM is optimized for (online marketing, digital marketing, internet marketing), and how search trends have changed over the last 18 months in the Phoenix area. The reason – ArcherSEM is a Phoenix online marketing agency, after all. Here’s the image of the dropdown box:

And then the results:

Hmmm. This shows us that the search term “internet marketing” has become the top term, over time. We will use that for our own internal optimization purposes. Sweet!

June 24th, 2010

Posted in
Mobile Marketing, SEO Consulting

Google Places = Google Local Business Center + Caffeine

Say goodbye to Google Local Business Center…and hello to Google Places.

Yes… Google Places will be an enhanced version of the Google Local Business Center. In the past, the Google Local Business Center helped to enhance the Google maps. When you clicked on a business with a pinpoint on a Google map, a bubble would open up to give more information about a business.

Think of it as the Google Local Business Center… on Caffeine (plus some mobile features).

Caffeine is the new indexing technology used by Google to organize and categorize web sites. Caffeine is more open to multiple kinds of web media (podcasts, video, images, blogs, tweets, Facebook and other social media). With Caffeine, you are rewarded for updating your website with fresh content in multiple formats. What is the reward? Higher rankings for the search terms that your targeted visitors are using to find your site.

The same applies to Google Places, where every location (business and non -businesses alike) can have items like photos, videos, a Street View preview, nearby transit, reviews and related websites.

Example of a Google Places account

For our ArcherSEM digital marketing clients with a mortar presence, enrollment in Google Places (as well as the Yahoo and MSN local business centers) is always part of our marketing plan.

But now that Google Places has been enhanced, we are updating our game plan for our SEM clients. In particular, we are planning for the day when Google Places will be included in the roster of geo-targeted mobile marketing sites. Right now, those kinds of sites include Four Square, Gowalla and Bright Kite. The next big players are entering this very hot internet marketing trend: Twitter and Facebook. Twitter is now experimenting with geo-targeting features, and Facebook has announced plans to enable people to “check in” to locations with their status messages.

See more ArcherSEM Search Engine marketing blog entries in the future about Google Places — and what it will mean for marketing your business online. We will be going over the benefits of coupons, video, reviews and metric monitoring of Google Places in upcoming postings. Talk to one of our small business online marketing experts about how we can create a Google Places account for your business and website.

June 9th, 2010

Posted in
Industry News, Link Development, Search Engine Optimization (seo), SEO Consulting, Social Media Marketing, Uncategorized

Using Bing’s Webmaster Central Tools

The Bing Search engine is turning out to be a pretty sharp tool for Internet searchers – prompting SEO consultants to take a closer look at the webmaster tools provided by Bing.

The SEO goal here:
• Make it easier to for Bing robots to comb through your site and index it correctly
• Do SEO link development research
• Gather keyword research data to help optimize your website and run a PPC campaign

As digital marketing consultants at ArcherSEM, the SEM specialists use all of the Search Engines’ webmaster tools for digital marketing research. Each search engine tool has its own pros and cons – and is useful for crafting SEO strategies that are honed for each search engine.
The first step: verifying your site with the Bing Webmaster Center. You can do that by placing a code file in your root directory of your website, or in the meta tags of your home page.

Verifying Your Site: First Step for SEO

Once that is done, the data will start to give you clues about the indexing. That includes:

a) Are some of your pages being blocked from getting indexed? That can happen with a poorly written robots.txt file or pages written with a content-type that is not accepted by Bing’s crawlers.
a) Is there malware associated with your site?
b) Are some of your pages broken and producing 404 errors?

The next step in digital marketing planning: keyword research. The Bing Webmaster Central has an Excel 2007 add-on called Microsoft Advertising Intelligence to help you do internet marketing keyword research. The tool (and it IS very handy to use this with Excel) will help you build keyword lists, and then create strategies based on data such as relevance, volume, cost history, demographic and geographic factors.

Link research is the first part of a SEO strategy. The Bing Webmaster Central has link research tools to provide backlinks and outbound links. Even more importantly, you can download the results and then analyze what Bing is looking for in links – and how that effects your Search Engine rankings.

Talk to a digital marketing consultant at ArcherSEM about crafting an internet marketing strategy for your business!

May 26th, 2010

Posted in
Mobile Marketing, SEO Consulting, Social Media Marketing, Social Network Advertising Management, Uncategorized

Location-Based Marketing for Phoenix Businesses

Recently, my husband and I were strolling around downtown Chandler, AZ, as we enjoyed an evening artwalk event. We stopped at the door of a restaurant with a large sign proclaiming “4 Square Night!: Check in!”
The restaurant – Urban Tea Loft – was offering a special that night to anyone who came through the doors and “checked in” with their mobile phones to notify www.foursquare.com of their location. My husband whipped out his Android phone and instantly downloaded the foursquare app to take advantage of the special.

I went home and followed the Urban Tea Loft on Twitter to obtain more updates from the restaurant about specials.

With very minimal time and no expense required, the local restaurant obtained two customers through location based marketing.

A smart strategy, indeed.
As a Phoenix online marketing agency, ArcherSEM recommends location-based marketing options for its retailer clients that depend highly on foot traffic – such as restaurants, clubs and recreational services.
How does it work?
The latest enhancements to phones now allow people to “check in” every time they step through your doors. Geo-targeting features that can pinpoint the location of some mobile phone devices; these phones are ideal for users of these location-based marketing services. The check in announcement is flashed to everyone on their network – and onto social marketing spots like Twitter and Facebook.
Why would anyone want to do this? An opportunity for coupons, promotions and prizes. And for gadget geeks who love to play with the apps on their iPhones and Androids, these services offer a chance to play with their toys and apps.
If you check-in enough, the mobile location based marketing services will shower participants with prizes and honors. It’s amazing the lengths people will do to earn some points and badges they can display on their phones and websites!
Other Phoenix and national online marketing agencies are providing this service for large retailer chains. Here’s a tweet from Starbucks, encouraging folks to check in at a local coffee shop and grab a coupon:

Some of the biggest players now in location-based marketing services that we recommend for our Phoenix online marketing clients:

Gowalla
Four Square
BrightKite

And coming soon, Twitter and Facebook are expected to come up with geolocation features. We’ll be keeping tabs on that for our Phoenix web marketing clients as well!

March 13th, 2009

Posted in
SEO Consulting

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Phoenix Arizona SEO / SEM / PPC consultants – Putting together your consulting outline

Looking back in your past, the feeling you get as you reminisce is an amazing feeling and I have witnessed this recently. We were hired and contracted for a local Phoenix Arizona SEO consulting job and in the midst of my agenda planning for this job I started looking back at some of the previous work myself and our staff had done over the course of 7 years and I was amazed at the difference between the 7 year old work and today’s high level executive overview work we do today.

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