Author: twsadmin

For years now content marketing has been the talk of the town so to speak, and 2014 is in many ways no different. Content is still king, and a content marketing strategy is essential for doing well in Google Search. Continue reading “Content Marketing in 2014”

Google’s authorship program, announced in June of 2011, has seen steadily increasing adoption over the past couple years. Basically, authorship markup is used to connect an author, via their Google Plus profile, with content they produce online. Continue reading “Google Authorship Overview”

First of all we’d like to wish all of our readers a Happy New Year 2014! We saw a lot of changes last year in the world of SEO, online marketing, social media, and beyond. Continue reading “Happy New Year & What 2014 Has to Offer”

We’ve covered a range of topics since we started blogging regularly near the end of September 2013. This has been something of an experiment to discover whether producing quality content, on a regular basis, could have a positive impact on the number of visitors we see on our site.

We saw some impressive numbers in the first two months:

• 24% increase in overall unique visitor traffic
• 770% increase in traffic from social media
• 24% increase in direct traffic

Some of our more popular posts have been on the following topics, which we’ll summarize briefly.

Google Hummingbird for Business

Probably the biggest piece of news in 2013 has been the new Google Hummingbird update. Google reported that Hummingbird was it’s most significant search algorithm update since 2001, well over a decade ago. Basically this update signaled that Google has moved from being a search engine to being an answer engine, and it’s now more social.

Rather than everyone getting the same search results for a particular query, Google is moving toward giving answers to your queries that are relevant to you. For businesses this is an important distinction to make because it means the content they produce has to answer questions, and be relevant to their audience. See our more complete Hummingbird analysis here.

The SMO of SEO

Social media optimization has really taken hold in 2013, and we predict its continued importance in the years to come. Given the more social nature of Google with Hummingbird, optimizing our content on and for social media has risen in importance as well. Experts are now saying that SMO is part of SEO.

For example Google indexes each G+ post directly so you’ll see links directly to social posts show up in your search results. Not only this, but Google has also been indexing publically available Facebook posts for some time now. Social activity is taken into account by Google when ranking content so the more popular on social our content is the better it will likely rank in search results. Check out our post for more on social media optimization.

An Introduction to SEO

Google has not abandoned its core search engine ranking system however. We covered some of the basics to this core SEO in two blog posts here and here. Keywords and keyword research continues to be a key component to ranking success in 2013. Keep in mind rules of thumb like use your keyword once for every 100 words of content, and be sure your content is generally between 600-800 words in length. Also keep in mind that it’s important to use your keyword in strategic places throughout your content. We also recommend building your websites in WordPress, and installing the SEO by Yoast plugin. Finally always include some media, photos or videos, in your content for extra SEO juice.

Google Hangouts for Business

Google Hangouts on Air (HOA) have been a very successful part of many businesses online marketing efforts in 2013, and we predict these will be ever more important in the coming year. We’re actually seeing Toyota adopting this feature, and taking things a step further by integrating HOAs into their sales process for the 2014 Corolla.

HOAs provide excellent SEO opportunities because of the automatically recorded YouTube video with its opportunities for keyword placement. HOAs can also be spun into additional content with the video included for further engagement. Check out our Google Hangouts for business post for more.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our year end review, and look forward to a successful 2014! We’ll be posting once more before the years out, and as always are looking forward to your comments. For more check out our blog where we post regularly.

Social media has become such a part of most of our lives that life without it seems a distant memory. It’s tough to imagine that Facebook has only been around since 2004 – that’s just 9 years ago. Interestingly, LinkedIn is slightly older, launched in 2003, making it just 10 years old. Twitter is slightly younger at only 7 years old, launching in 2006. Pinterest is a relative baby at 3 years old, and Google+ is younger still, at only 2 years of age.

Facebook is certainly the largest, and more active, social network available today with 1.19 billion active users. What may come as a shock to some is that Google+, the youngest of the bunch, comes in second by active user count with 540 million. Twitter, considered by many to be Facebook’s runner up, has only 232 million active users, just behind LinkedIn with 259 million active users.

What Active User Means

There are several different ways active user can be defined. Some active user stats come from daily active users, and some from monthly. More often than not stats, like those above, are referencing monthly active users. This means that a person has taken some action with the social network in question within a given month.

The action can be as little as clicking a like button, which doesn’t even have to take place on the actual social site. This means that we’re not talking about 1.19 billion people checking their Facebook pages every day, not even every month. What we’re talking about here are the number of people who interact in some way with a social network on a monthly basis.

Another Way to View Social Media

Another very interesting way to view social media is to look at social widgets. These are the interactive buttons you see on websites, and are part of what make up the active user stats we’ve been reviewing. The perspective here is to look at the number of top websites that use these social widgets.

A recent Moz article takes a look at the top 1,000,000 websites, and which social widgets they use. Here we see Facebook in the lead with 260,816, and the Google Plus One button coming in second with 164,531 sites using this button.

Social Media Perceptions

A final perspective is what people perceive to be the most active social networks. Watch ESPN for any length of time, and you’ll see mentions of Facebook and Twitter fairly frequently. This kind of perception based evidence tell us that people, the man on the street, don’t really perceive Google+ as being in the number two position.

Not only is Google+ in the number two position, it’s actually almost doubling Twitter in active users. We believe that perceptions take time to change, and that appears to be the case with social media. For example, Google+ has recently seen mentions by network TV shows such as Chopped on Food Network. Ted Allen says: +1 if you’re watching an all-new Chopped at 10|9c! Also Toyota recently began using new Hangout on Air features on Google+ to sell cars.

Optimizing your website for mobile is becoming less of an option and more of a requirement than ever before. The number one issue reported by mobile web users was slow load times (Gomez). This statistic is followed closely by the fact that the study found 46% of mobile web users were unlikely to return to a website if they had trouble accessing it. Perhaps worse is that 57% of this group would not recommend that site if they experienced trouble with the site.

These statistics highlight an underlying trend. That is if your website doesn’t have a mobile first strategy, or at the least a mobile minded strategy, your company will be left far behind the competition. Consider if that 46% number, which was from research in 2011, grew to 60% or 70% or even more. That would mean your company needs to seriously consider mobile optimization, or face the inevitable consequences.

Black Friday & Cyber Monday are Going Mobile

Further, we can see the importance of mobile growing when we look at Black Friday & Cyber Monday sales year over year from 2011 to 2012 in this infographic. Here we see that online sales from a mobile device climbed 16% in 2012 from the previous year. On Cyber Monday 2012, 18% of online shoppers checked out deals on their mobile device, and 13% of those actually made purchases directly from that mobile device! These numbers are up 12% and 7% respectively.

Looking at the above numbers from last years Black Friday & Cyber Monday, compared to 2011, we can see some definite trends continuing. It’s a fair bet that these trends will continue in 2013, 2014 and beyond. Projections for these deal days in 2013 have around 18% of consumers making purchases from their mobile devices, compared with around 14% in 2012.

Usability and Brand Experience

In our last couple posts, on business branding and company branding and design, we covered some basics as well as strategies for building a brand. That brand must be maintained, and consumer confidence will quickly lessen if their mobile experience isn’t top notch. Circling back to the Gomez study, we find that fully 74% of mobile web users are willing to wait more than 5 seconds for a page to load before leaving a site.

If your mobile page takes longer than 5 seconds to load you’ll be losing 74% of your mobile traffic. Interestingly 77% of top North American companies, from varying markets, have web pages that take more than 5 seconds to load. This spells enormous opportunity for your company!

Building the Mobile Experience

Providing a mobile optimized experience for your customers has never been easier. Simply paying attention to the need for a mobile site is more than half the battle. One option is responsive design. A responsive design delivers a consistent user experience across devices. Another option is to build a fully mobile version of your site, and technologies like Jquery Mobile make this option very attractive as well. Getting those mobile load times under 5 seconds is an attainable goal.

Get optimized for mobile now! It’s a very actionable goal, and will future proof your business. If the technical aspects to mobile optimization aren’t your specialty, hiring a professional is an excellent option.

Today we’re recapping a series of posts centered around online advertising and online marketing. These two are growing in importance, and will continue to shape our business success in 2014.

We’ve covered pay per per click (PPC) advertising. Google AdWords PPC advertising. Email marketing for business, and it’s amazingly high return on investment. Online video marketing, and finally we covered how social media optimization (SMO) relates to search engine optimization (SEO).

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC ads are setup on an auction system, and are a way for companies to pay for advertising in search results from search providers such as Google or Bing. Some of the key elements to PPC ads are as follows:

• pay attention to bid adjustments (don’t over or under pay for clicks)
• keyword research (as well as negative keywords)
• high quality, keyword focused landing pages
• quality scores are critical
• the relationship between keyword, ad text and landing page
• better quality scores lead to higher ad rank, and lower cost

While PPC advertising campaigns can be expensive, keeping in mind the above guidelines will set your company on the right path to PPC success.

Email Marketing for Business

Email marketing has a proven track record of success, and is one of the most established forms of online marketing. Interestingly, email marketing is more relevant today than it’s ever been because of it’s personal nature. The web is becoming a more personalized experience, and email marketing fits well with this model.

One of the most appealing aspects to email marketing for business is the high return on investment (ROI) that it delivers. For example, email marketing averages a revenue more than double the amount spent to generate it. This from a Marketing Sherpa survey finding that the ROI on email marketing was 119%, or more, for business.

Your keys to email marketing success are:

• keep your content valuable and high quality
• your emails should be a go-to place for helpful content
• they should build a relationship between you and your clients
• should present your company as the expert on topics

Online Video Marketing

Video marketing is not only engaging, and highly sharable, but because of these it has real SEO value as well. It’s no secret that Google tends to rank video content more highly than textual content, and this can be very advantageous for online marketing. For example, we’ve recently seen Google Hangouts on Air videos rank very well in Google search for some competitive keywords, and almost immediately.

Not surprisingly Google favors YouTube over other video, and a recent Marketing Land article outlines how YouTube videos are 8 out of 10 videos in Google search. YouTube videos work very well with SEO because they have titles, and descriptions into which you can place your keywords. Be sure to keep your video content helpful, and of a high quality for success with online video marketing.

The SMO of SEO – It’s all Changing Again!

Social media optimization (SMO) is now a key component to your successful search engine optimization strategy. With the recent release of Google’s Hummingbird update we’re seeing increased weight added to social signals. In a recent Search Engine Land article Eric Enge, a well respected leader in SEO, wrote, “With Hummingbird, Google now has the infrastructure to better process social signals (among other things).”

With social media signals taking a more prominent role in search engine optimization, the value of social media optimization has never been higher. These two, combined with PPC, form a solid search engine marketing campaign.

With a combined strategy of pay per click, email marketing, video marketing, and social media optimization, your company will have the kind of integrated online presence necessary for a strong bottom line in 2014.