Internet marketing Archives - Page 17 of 18 by Mark Murnahan

SEO Lateral Keywords

Lateral keywords can bring surprising results in your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Most good SEO professionals recognize the high importance of lateral keyword targeting, but they also want to sell you what you want to buy. In all of your excitement to reach the top of search engine results for your obvious top keywords, be sure that you do not forget about all of the many lateral keyword phrases that also apply to your industry.

What Are Lateral Keywords?

Lateral keywords are the keywords that branch out laterally from your assumed SEO target audience. These are the related keywords and keyword phrases that your competition often overlooks, and can provide great opportunities to reach your customers. An example would be that if you are trying to reach people for the keyword phrase “fishing rods”, it is simple to see why you would want to be returned in searches for “fishing lures” and a long list of other related fishing keywords. Where a lot of SEOs will stop is when it comes to other far-reaching lateral terms like “camping supplies”. This is a very sensible example, but it can be taken much further than that. These are also known as “long tail keywords”, and can cumulatively account for far more valuable Website traffic than the keyword phrases your competitors inundate.

Lateral Keywords Require Lateral Thinking

“Thinking outside of the box” is a very 1980s term, but that is what I mean by lateral thinking. In order to think laterally as it applies to your SEO, you must start by thinking like your customers. We all know this is step one in defining your market, but it is always a good reminder. If you think like your customers for just a moment, you can probably come up with a dozen good lateral keyword phrases in the time it takes to finish reading this paragraph. Another quick way to research your long tail market is to review your Website statistics. Sometimes the keyword phrases where only a few Website visits were generated can be a good start. They may be great keywords, but you are just so far down the search results list that you only have a few visitors.

Top Ranking for Lateral Keywords

Ranking on the top of search engine results for your lateral keywords is extremely valuable. In fact, I will take 20 good listings for lateral keywords than one or two listings for the “important” phrases. The good news is that it is often far easier to achieve a good ranking for these keywords. It may not seem as exciting, but you will often find that you will receive a very valuable target audience that you have been overlooking.

Internet Marketing Imagination: A Racing Webcast

If imagination is limiting your Internet marketing efforts, take a lesson from the professionals and open your mind to new Internet marketing ideas.

In early Spring 2008, I was tasked with developing an idea to reach more people in the fast growing demographics of automobile racing. Blogs are great, and can give a great mental picture of the action, but something was missing. Writing in blogs and posting some photos is great, but everybody was doing that. We needed something different and better. We needed imagination!

How About a Live Racing Webcast?

Enter the Live Racing Webcast. A racing Webcast, now there is a clever and fun idea to reach people. We could mount cameras in a racecar and air it in a live Webcast for people to come and watch our race season. We could distribute press releases in each of the hundreds of markets we would cross, and receive a lot of press coverage. It would be a great multimedia opportunity.

That is exactly what we did, but we did not stop with a live video Webcast. We added live in-car chat and a live GPS feed to make things even more engaging. We chose a time in early May 2008 to launch the Webcast with a 6,000 mile nine day maniacal road trip called the Cannonball One Lap of America. The event celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2008, and we were there to document it from beginning to end. Since the Cannonball requires drivers to drive the racecar itself from track to track across the USA, attracting much attention, we decided on the domain name, CopMagnet.com.

Internet Marketing With Imagination

I am often asked for new and better ideas about how to reach more people online. Fortunately for me, that is how I earn a living. I am an Internet marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) professional. My job is to develop new ways of defining and targeting an audience online. It is a great job, but one that comes with its own challenges. The greatest challenge is imagination. Fortunately, imagination is not my personal weakness, but it is often the weakness of my clients. Without marketing imagination, and the insight to implement new and better ideas to reach your market, you give everything to your competitors on a silver platter. The prevailing limitation to imagination is the people.

Internet Marketing Limitation: The People

If you close your mind to imaginative Internet marketing ideas, you greatly limit your potential. Think about your audience, and not yourself. Consider what appeals to them and what will engage them. If it is a racing Webcast, do it. If you find yourself short of ideas and your imagination is hurting you, consult a marketing professional and listen to what they tell you. They may just be on to something. When you open your mind to creative new possibilities, you are much closer to receiving their benefit.

Author Mark Murnahan is the Chairman and CEO of YourNew.com, Inc. and provides SEO consulting services to companies and non-profit organizations. Mark Murnahan may be reached toll free at 866-A-Web-Guy (*REDACTED DUE TO AGING WEBSITE*) for consultation.

Back to Business Basics: Remember Your Market Research

Chicken or Egg: We all have pondered the question of which came first, but how does this apply to your business? Once upon a time, you knew what came first. Recent economic concerns have led many people to forget or neglect the things that made them successful in the first place. If you have had concerns with the recent economy or how to improve your business, this is to you.

Market Research

Most successful businesses started as a great idea, but before you built a factory or opened a bank account, there was market research. Even if it was just asking a few friends, there was something to say that it would be worth the effort to bring your great idea to market. Market research is what gives people the confidence to invest themselves in a business or dismiss the idea and move on to the next brilliant plan. Once the market research returns favorable answers, progress can begin.

Marketing Plan

The next reasonable step in any business is a marketing plan. After all, without marketing, a business will fail. In order to sell a product, you must first know your market, and then find the best way to reach your market with your message. Even if the plan is to order 1,000 business cards and hand them out to everybody you know, there is a plan.

OK! This is where I can stop with the whole business lesson. What I covered in the first few paragraphs of this blog entry should be enough to remind you of where you started. If the present economic recession has clouded your view of the things that come first, it is time to remember the earliest days. The first challenges nearly any business will encounter revolve around marketing and helping others to discover the product or service offering.

Executing a Marketing Plan

In the beginning of most new companies, the funds are tight. For many business owners, the present economic environment provides a clear reminder of those times. If you can relate to this, what you knew back then was that regardless of all else you must execute your marketing plan. Executing your marketing plan was the only way you had hope of better days. The sales you received from that first marketing plan brought the profit needed to expand and continue. So, why should it be any different now?

Internet Marketing is the Most Affordable

The facts and figures surrounding the marketing industry show beyond a shadow of a doubt that Internet marketing is the most cost-effective means to reach your market. Even more specific than that, search engine optimization (SEO) is the most cost-effective approach to Internet marketing. Your marketing efforts shold be viewed as an investment, and any investment requires diligence.

Never Give Up!

Another clear lesson that everybody in business has learned is to never give up. If your marketing plan is not working, realign yourself and keep working to find what is effective. If your Internet marketing efforts are ineffective, Internet marketing did not fail, the execution failed. Consider the tips as follows:

Start with the most basic market research. Ask people you respect and trust for their evaluation and use what they tell you.
Read until your eyes hurt, and start with my blog. The new perspective is worth the investment of your time.
Learn about your market and how to reach the right people (see above).
Accept your marketing failures. Failure teaches far more than success.
Use what you already learned and perhaps forgot. Marketing came first.
Execute your marketing plan. A poorly executed plan beats well executed negligence.
Hire a professional. With qualified professional help, you greatly increase your opportunities.

SEO vs. PPC: The 2009 SEO Uprising

Search engine optimization (SEO) reaches the people who are looking for you right now, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising reaches a back-of-mind market similar to billboards and television advertising. Cost considerations and increasing market competition positions SEO for a huge uprising in 2009. Although it is likely that both SEO and PPC will continue to see big gains against all other marketing methods in 2009, my prediction is that the 2009 SEO uprising will be substantial and swift in the first half of the year and carry through the end of the recession.

SEO and PPC Comparison

Both SEO and PPC each have a strong place in Internet marketing, but let us look at a very simple comparison of SEO and PPC and how they each work for or against you. I will give you a description followed by pros and cons of both SEO and PPC.

Search Engine Optimization a.k.a. SEO

SEO focuses on bringing your Website to the top listings returned by search engines based on its relevance to a search engine user’s query. As quoted from my recent article “SEO in a Nutshell“, a simple decription of SEO is as follows:

“SEO is, the practice of improving the qualities of a Website in order to be better indexed in search engines. In very non-technical terms, SEO makes it possible that when somebody goes to their favorite search engine, usually Google, and searches for something, that they find your listing at or near the top of the list.”

Considering that the focus of SEO is to be found by customers rather than finding customers, it has a much higher conversion of lookers to buyers. Because of SEO’s very nature, it is the most targeted approach to the market.

SEO requires quality Website content that people want, and search for using a search engine. The content should be on-topic, which is to say that if the Website is about beauty products, you do not try to optimize it for fishing lures and tractor tires.

The Pros of SEO – SEO lasts a very long time. Once the content is produced, optimized for search engines, and reaches a high search engine placement, the cost stops while the reward keeps coming in. SEO provides residual benefit, and the return on investment (ROI) of SEO increases over time.

The Cons of SEO – The best results come from paying a writer and SEO professional to research the most effective keywords and achieve the proper search engine placement. This will generally have a higher upfront cost.

Pay Per Click Advertising a.k.a. PPC

PPC is generally based on a bid-rank system, whereby companies place a maximum bid for the position and frequency that their advertisement will be displayed, as well as a daily spending limit. For simple comparison, I am also grouping pay-per-impression advertising and other methods of online display advertising into the mix. They all have much similarity in that they display the advertisers message alongside the content that users were actually seeking.

There are many variations to the pricing models, but the basic principle is that the advertiser pays for each time somebody clicks on their advertisement, or in the case of pay-per-impression ads, every time the ad is displayed to a visitor. A key to PPC or display advertising success is in the ad placement strategically reaching the proper demographic.

The Pros of PPC / Display Ads – PPC and display advertising in general can provide greater exposure to a back-of-mind market that may not have considered your product or service until they saw the advertisement. This can prompt users to buy when they were not already in the market.

The Cons of PPC / Display Ads – Each method of PPC or other online display ads have a termination point. When you stop paying for the ads to run, the benefit is gone. There is not a residual benefit, and the return on investment (ROI) of PPC stops when the spending stops.

SEO vs. PPC / Display Advertising Summary

Each Internet marketing method has a place in Internet marketing, and they often work nicely together. With greater consideration given to the return on investment (ROI) of online advertising and marketing during recession, SEO has a leg up for 2009. While the ROI of PPC and display advertising drops sharply when the investment stops, the ROI of SEO keeps growing.

In either case, 2009 will bring changes to Internet marketing. It is most important that whether you use display advertising or SEO, you should do something to assure your place in the 2009 Internet market.

SEO in a Nutshell

I have written many volumes on the topic of search engine optimization (SEO) but a question was recently presented to me that required a nutshell answer of SEO. In only a few words, I will tell you what SEO is, and how it can benefit you. In fact, I will explain why your Website simply cannot do without SEO. I will leave out the statistics, Voodoo, and snake oil and give it to you simple and easy.

The Nutshell SEO

SEO is, the practice of improving the qualities of a Website in order to be better indexed in search engines. In very non-technical terms, SEO makes it possible that when somebody goes to their favorite search engine, usually Google, and searches for something, that they find your listing at or near the top of the list.

SEO is not just for big corporations. It can be effectively harnessed for even the least suspecting companies. More now than ever, people are using the internet when they need anything from a lawn service, a plumber, electrician, etcetera. They are not just seeking any lawn service, plumber, or electrician, they are searching for a lawn service, plumber, or electrician in Topeka Kansas (your city here).

Effective SEO is best based on a high quality, well programmed Website to start with. This makes SEO both a technical as well as artistic trade (related post).

How Does SEO Affect Your Business?

When a search is performed for terms relating to your industry, the search engine user will generally only look at the top few results. If your Website is not listed within the top ten, your odds of getting the searcher’s business is dramatically reduced. Adding insult to injury, somebody else likely did receive the business you have passed up.

SEO for Mom and Pop

A lot of smaller companies have questioned how this may concern them. The industry is such now that the cost of missed opportunities is quickly surpassing the cost of effective Website development and SEO. You should know that this same search engine user is not just entering the search term “plumber”, they are searching for a “plumber in Topeka Kansas”, (or electrician, lawn service, etcetera).

SEO Nutshell Summary

Just consider how you use the Internet, and how you find your way. If you go to the local telephone book for your electrician, lawn service, or plumber, you have become the minority. The longer you wait, the harder the SEO pill will be to swallow.