Understanding the Differences Between Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization

There are definite “buzz” words in today’s business industry. Two of the top buzz terms are Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization. What are they and how can they make your company more successful?

What Is SEM and SEO?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the broad term that describes all of the processes used to promote web sites. It is a form of online marketing that increases your web site’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). SEM includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising, and Content Advertising.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one tier under the broad umbrella of SEM. It is the process of increasing your web site’s organic (free) listing. SEO includes improving your web site’s usability and content, link building, social media, and more. The benefits are impressive: free listing; more web site traffic; increased sales and ROIs.

So What’s the Difference?

In today’s competitive business arena, if you have a web site, sell products and services, and striving to be successful, you will be engaging in online marketing, such as SEM. The question is which form of marketing under the broad spectrum of SEM is best for your company? Will PPC or SEO bring more success to your company? Let’s take a look at both of them.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising. When you choose PPC, you create your ad and choose keywords related to your business. When a consumer searches on Google, your ad appears above or to the right of the organic (free) listings.

The good news? You are advertising directly to a specific audience who is already interested in you, and you don’t pay to display your ad; you only pay when someone clicks on your link. Payment ranges from a few cents to several dollars per click. PPC can save your company money, and it can get a new site immediate exposure to potential customers.

The bad news? You only pay when someone clicks on your link. That means you are paying for those consumers clicking on your ad but discovering (for whatever reason) that they aren’t interested in your product; however, you are still paying for them to click on your site. PPC can be frustrating because you are paying for clicks but your sales may not be increasing due to the fact that genuine traffic is not being driven to your site. In fact, PPC ads miss the majority of potential consumers, because 95% of people click on the organic (free) link as opposed to a paid (PPC) link.

<p>SEARCH em (SEO)< Optimization Engine>SEO is the process of getting your company’s web site at the top of the search engine results page. Because 95% of consumers never click to the second-page of results, it is imperative to achieve first-page placement in order to be successful. The process of SEO is accomplished through useful web site content, relevant key words, and utilized links. Click here to read more on Understanding SEO. The foremost benefit of SEO is a higher volume of traffic to your company’s web site, which results in more ROI.

SEO is where the future of online marketing lies. Most companies are using this online marketing tool and recognizing it as the only tool to achieve optimal, first-page placement on Google. In fact, 55% of marketers worldwide reported that they will be devoting more resources to SEO in the future.

Why the Need for a SEO Expert?

Can your company muddle through the process of SEO on its own? Perhaps, but not timely or effectively. Effective SEO should be maintained by a qualified expert who understands the algorithm that Google utilizes for placement on their SERP. Google assigns placement on the results page through an algorithm, which is tweaked more than hundreds of times throughout a year. If you don’t know the algorithm and aren’t aware of how Google constantly changes the algorithm, your web site will get lost in the hundreds of pages of search results. Most local businesses do not have the expertise or time to persistently manage their web site’s placement.

SEO Can Make a Difference for Your Company

If you’re speculating about employing an expert in SEO, the sooner you do it, the better. A superior SEO firm, such as MAB Advertising, can help improve and redesign an existing site or launch a brand-new site that is search engine-friendly from start to finish. Utilizing the key to online marketing—SEO—can be more web traffic, sales, and ROI for your company.

Do you know …

• WHO is targeting your desired keywords?
• HOW MANY companies are competing for the same consumers?
• WHAT your competition is doing with their online marketing?
• WHAT your company can do better and what opportunities on which you can capitalize?

A qualified team of experts from MAB Advertising can help your company discover these answers and be visible, relevant, and successful in today’s competitive business world with SEO. Contact MAB Advertising today at 866.484.9411.

Time for a new blog post I suppose

Call Tracking with MAB Advertising

MAB Advertising Call Tracking enables publishers, advertisers, and agencies to cost-effectively measure inbound phone calls generated from online, search, mobile, direct mail, and other forms of direct-response marketing

The Overview

Know Exactly Which Ads, Campaigns, and Channels are Delivering Calls
We provide unique local or toll free tracking phone numbers you can easily assign to each of your campaigns that enables you to accurately measure the phone calls delivered and determine the return-on-investment for each campaign and advertisement.

Access Detailed Reporting and Analytics 24/7
We provide an online portal where you can access reports 24/7 that include information that is critical for effectively optimizing your advertising results and return-on-investment, including the number of calls generated and the ads that delivered them. You can even listen to recorded calls to help improve conversions and customer support.* We also offer a reporting API so you can easily download the data and seamlessly integrate it into your reports.

Works Anywhere You Can Place a Phone Number
MAB Advertising’s Call Tracking is so easy to use you can be up and running in a week. With a few mouse clicks, you will instantly know what advertisement is working and have the information you need to adjust and maximize your campaigns.

• Our Differentiators at a Glance
• Industry leading provider with a proven track record of success and innovation
• Easy-to-implement
• Largest footprint of local phone numbers helps you attract local customers and reduce toll charges
• Real-time phone number provisioning enables you to easily add numbers when you need them
• Superior call quality
• More than 50 customizable reports with detailed information on each call are available 24/7 through our password-protected, online reporting portal, enabling you to closely monitor your advertising campaign performance
• Analytics API available for easy integration with your existing reporting toolsWith our Site Proxy technology, call tracking numbers can seamlessly be inserted on your existing Web site – with no development work or changes required on your end
• With our Dynamic Number Replacement, the tracking numbers online advertisements can change on the fly, enabling you to track which keywords from your search campaigns are driving the most quality calls
• Our Click-to-Call and Form-To-Phone capabilities immediately turn any click or online form submission into an incoming phone call
• Optional call recording capability provides proof-of-conversion and enables you to monitor and improve your customer service*Caller information is captured (when available), enabling you to follow up on unanswered calls

If any of these proven methods to capture your audience and potential customers intrigues your what are you waiting for, if you need it, we have it, and at the lowest market cost.Give us a call today at 866-484-9411 or send us and email on our contact us page.

Where is Google and Apple’s relationship going?

So this past Saturday Apple released for sale the much awaited iPad, Apple Customers were waiting in line as long as Tuesday Morning to be the first ones to purchase this device.  What I don’t understand is other than the fact that it is the NEWEST product out by Apple, does it really complement your electronic systems, or in fact is it just a waste of space?  Apple customers have always wanted all of the products that this A+ company offer’s, but if you already have the iBook, the iPhone, and the iTouch, what is the point of having another product that does anything and everything that these other products offer?

Google on the other hand continues to build its empire by being the software designer for companies.  Here’s how they do it, they buy the company there are interested in and then redesign the software.  Brilliant for Google, and in my opinion, very bad for Apple.

Google ‘s most recent purchase is Episodic, and if you don’t know what Episodic is, it is a comprehensive platform for broadcasting live and on-demand video to the web or any web-enabled device.  The platform let’s publishers and marketers host, stream, measure and monetize video content.  Content creators, marketers and enterprise customers use Episodic to deliver video to the web and mobile device’s. — Yes I did take that definition from the Episodic Blog.

As we all know, or just in case you didn’t; Google “acquired” Android, Inc.  a small startup company based in Palo Alto, California in 2005, since that time it has broadened the programmers ability to write code for the Android OS by allowing a Java-based code to be used for all app’s.

Now that is all fine and good, but Apple still requiring their apps to be Apple approved, and Google allowing anyone to build apps and submit to the system, I see a new competitor in the mobile world of apps, and it’s not Apple.  Just make sure your Android OS Phone has an antivirus installed; Just saying…

Now back to the Episodic purchase, with Google already the leader in online search technology, and the Android OS being the only competitor to stand up to the iPhone technology, and now Google’s Episodic is the leader in Mobile Video,  I see some huge things happening at the Google Headquarters and I just can’t wait to be a part of it.

Matthew Brown

We are currently working one some social media for one of our clients. Once we finish this time to finalize the website.

Search Engine Marketing is a very valuable resouce for companies that is overlooked more and more each day. As the vast majority of consumers shop on the internet before ever stepping foot in a retail store, automobile dealership, hobby shop, or any other type of business, I am amazed on how much busienss’ overlook this resource.

Every company wants their website to be on top of every search, now they sit back and wonder why they are not in the top 3 or let alone he top page. Google, Ask, Yahoo, Altavista and other Search Engines rank websites on a number of different catigories. One of the ways is ofcorse a method called Search Engine Optimization, the problem with just running all of your cylinders on Optimization is the time and energy it takes to get on top when we all know that the one thing we do not want to do is wait.

However; there is a way around the time consuming optimization process. (Keep in mind without it you will never succeed online) The method to speed up the process is a method called Search Engine Marketing. Search Engine Marketing (or Pay Per Click Advertising, PPC) is an immediate solution for getting to the top of the search engine results in seconds, not weeks.

What a company should ultimatly do is have a strong internet marketing company run their website, optimization, meta’s, as well get on to the PPC train. The best part of this marketing is you deside what to spend! If your a large company, for example I have a large company out of London that spends about $40,000 a month in PPC or SEM advertising; as well I also have a number of smaller companies that only have a $200 budget for PPC or SEM.

The internet can be looked at as a popularity contest. The best way to get ontop of the popularity chain is to get popular; so how do you get popular you ask? Well continuing to have your name andcompany pop up on search engines frequently. The coolest part about this form of advertising is that as you begin your Sponsored Search Marketing which is another name for PPC or SEM, your name will start to get higher and higher on the Organic Searches which is where you want to be. The Organic side of things are free, and as a business owner I know just as well as you do that I want to start cutting advertising dollars just like the rest of you.

7 Tips for High Value Analytics

The analytics industry continues to grow, and more and more Webmasters and Web site owners are relying on analytics tools to provide them with information on how their Web sites are performing. This article will discuss some of the biggest issues faced by companies trying to get the most out of a Web analytics solution.

Limitations

For many Webmasters, analytics activities are limited to checking basic traffic numbers, such as the number of visitors, unique visitors, and page views. These are great numbers to know, but this is not where high value analytics lie.

In addition, many organizations have their analytics work done in a silo, separate from the rest of their organization. The person, or people, who look at the analytics do their own thing, get some value from it, and then move on. Once again, this approach results in limiting the benefits of Web analytics.

Another issue is the tendency to assume analytics data is always accurate. It is, after all, a computer program measuring a variety of signals that are coming into it from computer hardware – so there should be no errors, right? Unfortunately, as I learned in a recent analytics study we did, this is far from the case. There are, however, ways to deal with the accuracy limitations.

Key Steps for Maximizing Your Analytics Investment

1. Decide on Your Site Objectives: Before even beginning to decide how you want to use your analytics tool, you must have a very clear idea of what you are trying to accomplish with your site. For many people, this is something like “sell green widgets,” or “generate leads.” This may sound simple, but it’s a critical step.

   You want to focus your analytics effort on meeting the objectives of your Web site and not on anything else. Given the complexity of analytics, it is easy to get lost in investigating little mysteries instead of focusing on things that make you money. Being clear on your site objectives helps you get around that.

2. Pick Actionable KPIs: Now that you are clear on your objectives, you need to decide what to measure. The key test for deciding whether or not you want to focus on measuring a variable is whether or not changes in that variable will cause you to take action. In other words, if the KPI you are measuring goes up or down by 20 percent, will that cause you to take action?

   This ends up being the second major component of maintaining your focus when using Web analytics. Cruising around reading canned reports is not the answer (this is what Dennis Mortensen refers to as report surfing). The way to go is to focus on those measurements that provide insight into your business and tell you how your Web site is performing. Attempt to do this up front, and then update your selected KPIs as you learn more about the information you can extract about Web site performance from your analytics program.

3. Invest in a Business Analyst(s): Analytics pundit, Avinash Kaushik quite famously offered up the 10/90 rule. The basis of this rule is that 10 percent of your analytics investment should be in the software or service, and the remaining 90 percent should be on the people who use it.

   At the heart of this rule is one simple fact: High value analytics is hard. You can’t really think of it as taking an off-the-shelf tool, installing it, reading the reports, and then you’re done. Organizations that get the highest ROI on analytics are those that have really smart people focused on deriving value from their tools

   You need the right type of people to do this work, too. The business analyst who can do this work well will be a person who has a sharp technical aptitude, as well as a strong marketing and business sense. This person must have both pieces of the puzzle in place to be well suited for this type of work.

4. Create a Data-Driven Organization: The first three steps above were all focused on making sure that you use your tool in the optimum manner. But this won’t get you anywhere if your organization is not set up to act on the results.

   Not acting on actionable data is a common problem in many companies. To deal with actionable data in your business requires a cultural commitment to act upon the data as appropriate. For example, if the site’s sales conversion rate drops suddenly by 30 percent, people must be ready to act on this information.

   Perhaps marketing needs to investigate whether or not competitors have dropped prices, or management may need to reconsider a recent change in the terms and conditions offered on your site. Sudden KPI changes can affect many different departments. The key is to set up the organization so everyone is looking at the key numbers affecting them, and accept that responding to significant changes in the numbers is part of their job.

5. Verify Your Implementation: One of the biggest sources of error in analytics is implementation error. This can be pages that do not have the analytics JavaScript tags on them, or pages that are incorrectly tagged. Either way, this can throw your data analysis into a tailspin.

   The best way to deal with this is to carefully verify your implementation. Treat the addition and/or modification of your analytics JavaScript tags the same way you would any other software development process. This is a source of error in analytics that is completely under your control, so take the time to eliminate it from the picture.

6. Monitor Accuracy and Cross Check: Now that you have eliminated implementation error, you are indeed better off. However, there can still be significant errors in analytics. This stems from the poor quality of information coming into the software. For example, many proxy servers strip referrer information, and many people use services like AOL where the IP address they are coming from changes in the middle of a given session.

   There are many such sources of error, and each analytics package decides how to deal with these types of anomalies in different ways. The end result is many judgment calls, some of which are going to be wrong. In spite of these errors, the data you get still has incredible value, but you have to limit the scope of how these errors affect you.

   One way to do this is to use alternative types of tools to cross check your data as much as possible. For example, you wouldn’t use your analytics solution to count the number of orders you get from your PPC campaign, as it would miss some of the orders.

   For this, you are better off tagging the end of the URL used in your PPC ads with parameters that your Web application can read during the ordering process. Then you can use your Web application to tally up the total orders, focusing your Web analytics on other tasks it does better than absolute measurement.

   What’s that, you ask? Web analytics are great at relative measurement. If the tool provides you with a set of numbers over time, and you look at relative changes in those numbers, you will be looking at very useful and very accurate information. More on this in my next point.

7. Focus on High Value Add Analyses: Bearing in mind the true value of Web analytics lies in relative measurement, you want to use the tools where that strength is leveraged. Here are some examples of such activities:
   • Segmentation: Break your visitors into segments. See how the behavior of the different groups differs. I went into the topic of segmenting visitors in much more detail in last week’s column, so check out that article for more on this topic.
   • A/B Testing: Comparative performance of different landing pages, different price points, different ad copy, different product offers – these are all gold mines. Most Web analytics packages make this easy to do.

     How much can you gain from this? Think of it this way. No matter how experienced a marketer you may be, the chances of designing the penultimate marketing campaign, ad copy, keyword buys, landing pages, etc., on the first try using only your experience is essentially zero. Virtually every Web site can benefit from doing this type of testing.

     Of course, testing is a non-trivial investment, and you need to have a really good business analyst on board to get the best results.

   • Measure Keyword Performance: You can use your analytics package to find keywords that offer a higher than average ROI, and you can use it to find poor performing keywords. With this information, you can tailor your PPC campaigns and drive up the ROI.

Summary

As I said, high value analytics is hard. Of course, for smaller Web sites, it is difficult to justify making the investment to do some of the things I outlined above. But as your site’s revenue base grows, analytics can offer a very high ROI on your investment in the tools and the people using them. Keep these seven key steps in mind as you begin that journey, and last of all, be patient.

Finding the optimum way to use analytics on a relatively large site requires experimentation and exploration. Start with the rightapproach, be patient, and evolve your strategy as you learn more about your Web site, your customers, and the analytics tool you are using.

Your Website – What do you need to consider when evaluating?

Conducting a site review takes time, and the seven questions that follow can help you cover all the bases.

1. Look at structure. Is your Information Architecture structured in such a way as to put relevant informational pages within the same category/bucket? This is most commonly called theme-based structure. Do you have enough pages of relevant copy within the site? I’ve mentioned it before, but a 20 page Web site in a competitive vertical is going to be difficult to be successful with, so you should consider adding a blog or otherwise develop good content within the site.
2. Look at URL propagation. Are your URLs optimized? www.domain.com/page-name is the best way to structure your pages. (But before you go and change all your URLs, speak with a professional first.) If you are rewriting your URLs, be sure that you are putting into place the proper redirects (probably best to put 301 redirects into place). Some search engines do better than others at following redirects, so as mentioned, consult with a professional before you do anything drastic.
3. Look at design and functionality. Is your site user-friendly? While this isn’t strictly SEO-related, it is absolutely necessary for customer conversion, brand reputation, and customer retention. Are your callouts located above the fold? Are they easily discernible? Is your contact form or shopping cart easy to use?
4. Look at the code. Is your site W3C compliant? Is it Section 508 compliant? W3C compliance entails clean code without errors. Section 508 compliance involves enabling your site to be readable and usable by users with various disabilities.
5. Look at your Meta tags. Do each page’s Meta tags accurately reflect the content of the page? Are the keywords employed popularly searched for what you offer? Remember, the Meta keywords tag is not the all-powerful “optimization” platform that it might have been in the year 2000. Title tag, then Description, and then Meta keywords is the proper way to think of these, in terms of valuation and importance.
6. Look at your content. Do your H1 and other headers reflect each page’s keywords? Do you even have H1 headers? You should. Headers, Content, and Meta tags should all adhere to a keyword theme on each page.
7. Look at interior linking. Are you using keyword-rich anchor text to link to pages devoted to the keywords used in your links? Are your most important pages receiving link love from the rest of the site?

What is Social Media?

Primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories and experiences. Businesses also refer to social media asuser-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).

EXAMPLES

Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few. Examples of social media applications are Google Groups (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Facebook (social networking), Youmeo (social network aggregation), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Avatars United (social networking), Second Life (virtual reality), Flickr (photo sharing), Twitter (social networking and microblogging), Tenporium (social polling and consumer product reviews) and other microblogs such as Jaiku and Pownce. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms like Mybloglog and Plaxo. – Wiki

Something that I really love… I ran across an artical by “Francis Anderson” on Social Media, and I wanted to share it with all of you.
Is Social Media Marketing A Waste Of Time?

Well, someone thinks so: “Social media is the next big thing! No, it’s the big thing! It is here, now, and it is big! Let’s face it, if you’re not aboard the cluetrain to social media marketing city, you’re sitting on that station alone!”

Content or Audience? New Study Finds the Answer

A recent study may put to rest the Internet marketing version of the chicken and the egg debate once and for all. Should we as ecommerce marketers be targeting online content, or should we be going after the audience?

Now, new findings from the Online Publishers Association suggest that content is king: Ads on branded-content websites are more effective than non-branded sites and outpace industry norms in nearly every category.

The study, entitled “Improving Ad Performance Online: The Impact of Advertising on Branded Content Sites,” gives credit to viewer trust and brand name recognition for the statistics it found.