Videos are one of the most popular forms of online content today. According to Business Insider’s The State of the Internet, there were over four billion hours of YouTube videos watched per month in 2012. With the enormous popularity of video, it is important for your website to take advantage.

Here are three ways you can use video to benefit your website:

• Increase your reach. Videos are very popular on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and with over 100 million users watching online video a day, one popular video can bring in huge amounts of new traffic, likes, and followers.
  • Many successful ad campaigns are often based around video. The most successful campaigns get the population involved by asking them to share or even create their own videos. A great example is the Doritos Super Bowl commercial contest, where fans created their own videos and a winner was chosen through social media voting.
• Improve engagement. Videos allow you to create a more personal connection with users, share important information about your products or services, and improve interaction on your site. Adding how-to videos, product demonstrations, or promotional videos are all great ways to encourage users to interact.
  • Econsultancy says videos improve engagement, because they create the sense of customer satisfaction in visually seeing what the product looks like in a 360 degree world.
• Increase conversions. Users often watch videos to learn more about a product and its features, and people prefer learning that information by watching rather than reading.
  • In a case study by Visual Website Otimizer, a personal trainer saw a 46 percent increase in conversion rate when he made a video based on the text from his sales page.
  • According to ComScore, people who view video on a retail site for two minutes or more are 64 percent more likely to buy. People like watching videos, and if you have a good video which showcases your products or services, people are more likely to buy from your brand.

   

The post How Video Can Benefit Your Website appeared first on PrairieWeb Internet Marketing.

The study also listed location, local offers, and promotions, as the key factors influencing mobile search. In fact, 1 out of 3 smartphone users and 1 out of 4 tablet users surveyed, said they use their devices specifically for businesses phone numbers, addresses, and driving directions.

These recent findings mean that it is now more important than ever that your website is optimized for both mobile devices and local search. If not, you are missing out on a great deal of traffic and potential sales. Here are a few tips for mobile and local optimization:

Mobile Optimization:

• Don’t Cut and Paste –  Mobile users use websites differently than traditional PC users, so you shouldn’t just recreate your current site for phones. As mentioned earlier, searchers are often looking for phone numbers or directions, so be sure to include this information in a way that is easy for visitors to find and use.
• Simplify – There is less screen space, so include only what is essential. Be sure to make the site easy to navigate and simplify the steps from entry point to purchase.
• Avoid Flash and Javascript – These technologies are not supported by all mobile devices, using them extensively will cause the experience for some visitors to greatly suffer.
• Allow Users to Visit Full Site – Some visitors just want the standard site. Include a link to the desktop version to make it easier for them to get the experience they want.

Local Optimization:

• Claim Listings on Local Directories – We already listed the benefits of claiming local listings, but can’t overstate their value. Local directories like Google Local for Business, Yelp, Bing, etc., all improve your standing in local search and will drive mobile traffic to your site.
• Get Reviews – Write emails to clients and customers, and ask them to leave a review on Yelp, Yahoo Local, or any other site to build on your behalf. Reviews appear in local search results and have an impact on customers in the purchase process.
• Add Local Content – Content is very important for generating links and improving search results. By adding local keywords or community-oriented content to your site, you will improve your standing in general searches as well as local searches.

The post Mobile Search More Important Than Ever appeared first on PrairieWeb Internet Marketing.

This was an interesting event and a pretty cool project for US Hose Corp. And through this project, we were able to create some quality content for their site and use it as an unique internet marketing opportunity.

Here are some ways that you can use your events to boost your online marketing:

Press Releases –

For a number of years, companies primarily used press releases as a way to generate backlinks. Google has recently devalued links from online press releases and because of this, many companies are now no longer publishing them. While the devalued links are a problem, press releases are still the best way for generating media buzz for a client.

If you write a quality press release and get it in the hands of the right people, it can get you coverage in a paper or magazine, which can generate links, shares, and social media engagement.

It can be difficult to get your press release made into an actual news story, but here are a few tips for improving them:

• Find the Right Angle – journalists look for topics that are “newsworthy,” meaning stories that are local, unique, current, significant, or have human interest elements. By framing your press release around one of these angles, you improve your chance of having a story written. For the US Hose event, we created one press release specifically designed for the local newspapers, emphasizing the fact that a local company was solving a problem for the International Space Station. This is the kind of story that would be of interest to the community, and turned out to be more successful than a generic release would have been.
• Write Like a News Story – the best way to get a story picked up is to make the work easy for the reporter. Most news stories are written using what is called the “inverted pyramid” style, where the basic information, (who, what, when, etc.) is right up at the top, in the lead, and then the story becomes more specific as it goes on. By writing your press release in this style, you make less work for the reporter, and improve the chance your story will be picked up.
• Avoid a Sales Pitch – you have to remember that newspapers and magazines aren’t there to advertise for you. Make sure your press release explains why writing a story about this event would provide value to that outlet’s readers. If your release comes across like an advertisement or promotional material, it will most likely be thrown in the trash.

Content Marketing –

Content Marketing has a number of benefits, and big events like this are a great source of interesting content for your site. You can write a recap of the event, profile the speaker, include a video of the presentation and any materials used, take pictures, or create a case study based on the new product. All of these things will provide interesting and useful information for your site’s visitors. In addition to benefiting visitors, quality content can attract new inbound links and increase your standing in organic search results.

The content doesn’t just have to be on your site. By sharing your new content on industry related blogs, you will expand your reach. Each time you share an article, video, or photo, you are exposing your brand or services to a larger audience. Getting other blogs to post your content can be difficult, but write ups about events, like an astronaut coming for a visit, are usually interesting enough that other outlets will want to share them.

Social Media –

After receiving some press coverage and putting new content on your site, you can use your social media channels to share that content and engage followers.

• Sharing news stories written about your company is a great way to showcase the work your company is doing. You can provide interesting content for the followers you already have as well as hopefully gaining some new followers through viral content.
• By posting articles, videos, etc. from the event in relevant Facebook or Linkedin groups, you can engage other professionals within your industry and showcase yourself as a leader in that industry.
• By uploading and tagging pictures and videos from the event, you’re exposing your content to many more potential followers. This is a good way to increase brand awareness.

The post How to use Events to Boost Your Internet Marketing appeared first on PrairieWeb Internet Marketing.

If you’re still on the fence about content marketing, here are three benefits of establishing content that might help change your mind:

Build Brand Awareness

Content marketing is all about engaging readers and building relationships. Continually providing readers with useful information, not just sales pitches, helps to build awareness and can create a strong following for your company.

According to a recent survey from the Custom Content Council, 68 percent of consumers like custom content because it’s tailored to their interests and 55 percent say they’re more apt to buy a product from a company who provides them with custom content. With a following comes trust and comfort, trust and comfort can contribute to sales later on down the road.

Generate Traffic

Unique content can spark an interest in the public and bring in a good amount of traffic. New videos, infographics, and blog posts go viral every day and can reach hundreds or even thousands of prospective customers and lead them back to your site.

By adding the right keywords to your posts, your content also helps to boost your website’s rankings in search engines. By sharing your content on other industry related blogs, you can not only find a new audience, but also build quality links. To make your business more visible through search content:

• Create a company blog and social media pages
• Post  quality content on social media
• Submit informational or how-to videos
• Write articles to share on other online publications
• Send out email newsletters
• Participate in guest blogging opportunities

Thought Leadership

Effective content marketing allows you to demonstrate your expertise. You already know your industry and content provides a way for you to share that knowledge and receive recognition for it. You can post articles that offer solutions to commonly asked questions or concerns,  share how-to videos demonstrating a special technique or use of a product, or even create an infographic showcasing the benefits of one of your services.

By providing customers and prospects with quality information, you develop credibility. This credibility will cause visitors to see you as a thought leader in your industry and come back  to learn from you again and again.

The post Three Ways Your Business Can Benefit from Content Marketing appeared first on PrairieWeb Internet Marketing.

There will now be a number of different feed options and Facebook will be placing a greater emphasis on visual content in those feeds. Here is how those changes are going to affect your Facebook marketing.

More Feeds

In the past, users could organize stories either in a chronological pattern, or by viewing top stories. With the new options, users will be able to organize their stories in more ways than they could have ever done before.

The default option will be similar to the current News Feed, however Facebook users will now have more specific feeds to pick from. Here is a breakdown of the new feed options:

• All Friends – everything shared by your friends. This will include status updates, check-ins, what your friends are listening to on Spotify, and much more. This page will only include updates from your friends, so any updates from a brand or business page will not show up here.
• Photos – No links or statuses, only photos. This feed will include your friends new photo albums and profile pictures, as well as photos shared by the pages you follow.
• Music – Posts from musicians you’ve liked, updates on new releases or upcoming concerts, and the most popular songs your friends are listening to will show up in the music feed.
• Following – Similar to the current Pages Feed, the following feed will include posts from people and brands that a user follows. Any status, picture, or article shared by a brand or business will show up in this feed.

In the press conference where Facebook announced these changes, News Feed tech lead Chris Stuhar said, the Following feed will contain every single post from the pages you like and the feed’s content will be arranged “in chronological order to make sure publishers know their fans can see every post they make.”

This is good news and bad news for marketers. One of the most frequent complaints of page owners is that their updates don’t show up in a follower’s feed. This will change that. However, it will change that for every other page too.

Page owners will now need to put more emphasis on when their updates are released, so they are initially seen by the highest number of online followers possible, or else run the risk of having their content buried by posts from other pages.

There are still two big Feed questions facing marketers:

• Which feed will users actually use?

While marketers complain that their content doesn’t show up, users complain that their feeds are too cluttered.  If a user is tired of seeing a flood of updates from all of the pages they like, they will be able to avoid them altogether by viewing the All Friends Feed. This could greatly hurt the value of having a page. Marketers will need to collect data in order to determine what, if any, the choice of feeds has on page interaction.

• What role will Ads play in all of this?

During the press conference, Facebook was unclear as to how Ads will be factored into the new feeds. Facebook is now a publicly traded company with obligations to shareholders, so it makes sense that these changes at least in part, have advertisement revenues in mind. Marketers will just  have to wait and see how Ads will be incorporated into these new feeds and how effective they will be.

Visual Content

A before and after the news feed change photo comparison

The new feed is going to be much more visual. Photos and videos are going to be much larger and dominate a user’s feed like never before. In addition, when your friends like a new page, your News Feed will include that page’s profile picture, cover photo, and images of other friends who have liked that page.

These changes make it more important than ever that your brands’ updates have rich content and interesting photos. The cover photo can no longer just be a nice picture, it needs to attract potential followers and showcase your brand.

The pages that are going to generate the most likes and engagement are the ones who take advantage of the new visual opportunities. If you are not currently uploading interesting photos with every one of your articles, you need to start, or else Facebook will leave you behind.

The post How Facebook’s News Feed Changes Impact Your Business appeared first on PrairieWeb Internet Marketing.

The Way Graph Search Works

Graph Search gives users the ability to find pages of businesses, including restaurants, that their friends like on Facebook. In addition, people can plug in search criteria such as city and state. Also, Graph Search adds a personal touch to what it has to offer. It gives users the option of pulling up Facebook photos of friends taken at different restaurants or other businesses. Plus, people can find recent check-in posts at area locations as well.

Essentially, Graph Search provides a search engine within Facebook itself. But in order for it to earn widespread use, it requires people to like and share when they visit various restaurants.

How to Build Graph Search for Restaurants

Restaurants that have taken the time to engage with their customers on Facebook will get the most out of Graph Search. Joe Sorge, the Chief Executive of Milwaukee-based Hospitality Democracy, believes his restaurants are coming up in search results because he has focused a lot of effort on developing likes and check-ins.

“That work we do to connect to those customers walking through our door and getting them to like our page and interact with us is what has made us prominent in Graph Search,” Sorge says.

Sorge feels that location-based social media platforms that link to people’s Facebook feeds such as Foursquare could increase a restaurant’s presence on Graph Search, too.

This local component is a big part of how Graph Search operates. So social media experts think operators will have to create Facebook pages for every location they run in a given region.

Get Graph Search-Ready

Although Graph Search is still at the beginning of its development, there’s a good chance this new feature will be the next big thing on Facebook. So now is the time to get your page in prime form.

If you haven’t put much energy into a Facebook page, it would benefit you to interact with your patrons on this platform. The more likes and shares you get from your page, the more Graph Search will be able to help you enhance your customer base.

Be sure to have accurate location information included on your page. This means a street address and even GPS coordinates on the page’s “About” section. After putting a great deal of time and thought into your page, you want people to know exactly where to find you.

Remember, this is essentially free advertising. So take advantage of it by looking at both Facebook and Graph Search as important tools to encourage new and existing visitors to enter your doors. You might see revenue increases as a result.

The post How Facebook Can Influence Restaurant Referrals appeared first on PrairieWeb Internet Marketing.

You need your social media to be unique and engaging in order for it to benefit your company. Here are five steps to improve your company’s social media.

1. The first step is to be active. If you don’t log in regularly and check your site, you won’t know what is going on. Whether you choose to focus on Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest, Google +, or all of these sites, it’s important that you develop a plan.

Consider what you want to achieve and what you want from your audience. Maybe it’s recognition, consumer trust, or increased traffic. When developing your plan, remember it’s important that brands avoid turning their social media pages into advertising platforms. The ‘Global Trust in Advertising’ survey conducted by Nielsen Media, the results of which are shown in the graph to the right, found that only 36 percent of people trusted ads on social media. In building your plan, you need to consider what your audience needs and what they want to learn, not just another outlet for posting ads.

 2. This second step is to increase your number of followers. Your followers are usually people who like your brand or website so much that they’ve taken the initiative to hear from you more through social media. If you haven’t attracted a significant number of followers naturally, don’t worry.

To help build a solid follower base on Twitter, seek out authority figures or experts in your industry. Follow the people who are following them and whose profiles indicate that they’d be interested in your company. It’s likely that some people will follow you back automatically. Sites like Facebook are different because it’s a permission based website but the same tactic can be applied. Soon, through sharing and word of mouth you can build a solid audience who may turn into customers one day.

There are other tools that can help you find followers on Twitter and social media sites. Followerwonk helps you find and connect with followers, analyze their habits and interests, and optimize your activities on Twitter. TweetAdder is software that can be used to increase your amount of followers and automatically generate tweets. Just remember quality is better than quantity. You need to attract followers that are interested in your content and could benefit from your updates.

3. You must post unique, stimulating content. You can do this in a number of ways:

• Ask and interesting question
• Comment on a recent news issue
• Share an article
• Post an inspirational quote or picture

Always include a call to action in your post to encourage interaction (What do you think? Share your thoughts). Remarkable content will enhance the chance for engagement and social sharing. The importance of having your audience interact on your page is that they represent the people who have put forth the effort to engage in your brand on an elevated level instead of just simply viewing the content.

It is important to actively share content in order to generate interaction, however for some businesses it is impossible to create new infographics or blog posts every day. Using curated content on your social media is another way you can drive engagement on without needing to create new content every day. Curating content involves discovering and presenting videos, articles, pictures, songs or any piece of online content. Websites like Digg, Delicious and AllTop are great for finding interesting content. Tools like Paper.il,  Redux and BagTheWeb all help businesses sort through online content to find the most relevant information for their needs.

4. Integrating photographs to the content is a great tactic for your social media. We live in a world that relies on imagery to capture attention, make connections and act upon a reaction. Photographs are like the magnets that pull your audience in. They are much easier on the eye and can generate the same effective response as a blog or article would.  Create an integrated content strategy around photographs when using social media platforms

5. Say thank you when people make positive comments or share your brand and content on social media. Such a simple rewarding phrase goes a long way. Acknowledged followers are more likely to share your brand again and provide a great word-of-mouth reference.

The post 5 Steps to Improve Your Company’s Social Media appeared first on PrairieWeb Internet Marketing.

Here are 6 reasons why you should claim your business page on each one of them.

They are Free

Claiming your business page on one of the many local directories won’t cost you anything. While some of the sites will offer advanced paid advertising opportunities (and might ask you about them repeatedly), the basic pages are free to claim and update.

Beat the Competition

Many companies have not claimed their listings. By claiming your page and enhancing the listing with product descriptions, photos, videos, hours of operations, and other helpful information, your result is more likely to show up in both searches within the local directory and on the major searches.

Google and Bing search results now often include maps and extra business information in the local listings above the rest of the organic results. The websites at the top of these local results are often the ones who have taken the time to claim and enhance their local directory listings.

Control Your Information

Your business probably shows up in a number of local listings already. Sites like Yelp and InsiderPages are full of unclaimed pages created by users or with information from other sites. These pages are usually incomplete, can have old phone numbers, or don’t include links to your website. If a potential customer finds an incomplete page, they will likely one that is complete. By claiming and enhancing your page, you can ensure that the information is all up to date and helpful to any potential customers.

Improved Mobile Search Rankings

More people are searching on their smart phones than ever before. Completing local SEO will greatly improve your rankings in mobile searches. If you combine this local SEO effort with a mobile-friendly site, you can provide mobile users with maps or driving directions so they can easily find your business right from their phones.

Review Opportunities

Many local directories including Google Places and Yelp, allow users to review your business. These reviews provide loads of valuable information to other users who will use it when making decisions. Claiming your business page allows you to monitor this feedback, learn from it, and even respond to criticism if need be.

The post 6 Reasons Small Businesses Need To Claim Local Listings appeared first on PrairieWeb Internet Marketing.

This will soon be changing, as Google’s Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts recently announced in a video that they will provide examples of links that are considered to be untrustworthy and in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines. Cutts said, “A feature that we’re working on and that we are in the process of rolling out, which I’m pretty excited about, is that we will basically give you examples. So as we’re building the incident, whenever a webmaster analyst is saying ‘OK, these are links not to trust,’ we’ll include an example link. You might get one, you might two, you might get three, but basically it will give you an idea of the sorts of links that we are no longer trusting.”

While the examples are not being sent out yet, Cutts mentioned a few types of potential unnatural link warning triggers. They included, too many widget links, keyword-rich anchor text links, article directories, and paid links.

Bad Links And What To Do About Them

Too Many Widget Links

Many widgets and templates include a link back to the site of the creator. These widgets and templates can be used on poor quality spammy sites. Too many of these poor quality links can in turn hurt the site of the creator, which the widget links back to. To prevent this kind of penalty, find the worst sites using your themes and ask them to remove the attribution. Also, remove or rel=nofollow every attribution link you put in your releases from here on out.

Keyword-Rich Anchor Text Links

Anchor text is the clickable text in links pointing to your site. Keyword-rich anchor text refers to links which contain your target keywords within the text of the link. If you sold red widgets, the keyword-rich anchor text could be “Buy Red Widgets” or “Red Widgets For Sale.” Keyword-rich anchor text can help increase your rank for a particular keyword, however you need to be very careful about not overdoing it. Google’s Penguin update penalized sites with over-optimized anchor text or sites with a huge number of links using one keyword phrase. Now, you should try to build a variety of links, some that are keyword rich, some without keywords, and some just using your site name.

Article Directories

They used to be a great source for links and would sometimes even rank in Google search results. But Google has greatly devalued links coming from article directories. To prevent this kind of penalty simply avoid using article directories. You should share your articles or content on your own blog or find relevant, industry related blogs to share with.

Paid Links

Buying links for the purposes of passing page rank is simply in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. If you paid for links in the past, simply try and remove them. Going forward, use content and build relationships with clients and other sites in your industry to generate good backlinks that you don’t have to pay for.

For more information, here is the full video:

The post Google Will Soon Include Examples of Unnatural Links appeared first on PrairieWeb Internet Marketing.

To answer this question, I analyzed the web traffic and leads for a client for 2012. This client buys and sells used machinery through their website. Their marketing plan consists of a combination of SEO work and PPC campaigns through both Google and Bing. Some examples of broader keywords within this client’s industry are “used machinery” and “used machines.” Both of those terms have over 100,000 Local Monthly Searches and so ranking highly for these keywords should in theory bring in a ton of traffic and leads.

Web Traffic

In 2012, their website had 309,920 total visitors. To break that number down further, 93.40% of the total traffic was from searches, with 78.64% of that search traffic being from pay per click campaigns and the other 21.36% being organic. 4.64% of the total traffic was direct and the remaining 1.96% of traffic was from site referrals.

Less than a quarter of their web traffic was from organic searches. This means that a marketing plan focused on Google rankings would not be the best strategy for generating traffic, but what about leads?

Leads

In 2012, the website generated a total 4,882 leads. To this company, leads are considered an online quote request. The chart below breaks down those leads based on traffic medium.

The majority of their leads, 57.58%, came from paid searches, while only 31.11% came from organic traffic. This client ranked highly for a number of their keywords and this contributed a good amount of web traffic, however organic searches accounted for less than a third of their overall leads.

Organic Leads

Organic traffic did not contribute the most leads, but out of the leads that it did contribute, were they the result of those broad keywords as many would suggest? The chart below lists some of their top performing keywords.

I found that visitors were more likely to request a quote after searching for narrow terms like “click press” or “metal shear,” than the broader “used machinery” or “used machines.” Furthermore, there were 1,302 different keywords which led to conversions during 2012. Many of these were for specific products such as “10 foot 75 ton press” or “10 foot mechanical metal sheer.” While many of those specific searches only converted once, the volume of those individual conversions is much greater than the total number of conversions from the broader keywords.

In the buying cycle, customers search broadly at the beginning and search much more specifically later on, once they know what they actually want. This is why search terms like “10 foot mechanical metal sheer” bring in less overall traffic but convert at a higher rate. Someone who is searching for “10 foot 75 ton press” already knows what they want, so they’re more likely to convert once they get to your website. This is why it is better for business to shift your focus from ranking for broad keywords, to ranking for specific search terms.

Conclusion

Don’t get sucked in to internet marketing pitches based around the importance of ranking in Google, keyword rankings should not be the goal of your business, leads and sales should be. Just as this client did, you can generate more leads through a balanced approach. In a previous blog post,  I warned about the dangers of Putting All Your Eggs In Google’s Basket. By focusing on rankings you can miss out on some other great opportunities for expanding your business. Instead of focusing on broad Google rankings, generate interesting content, interact with followers through social media, and rank for more specific search terms. While you might miss out on some of the organic traffic earned from high rankings, the visitors that do come to your site will convert better and you will generate more sales and leads because of it.

Do you agree that a balanced marketing plan can help more than a focus on rankings? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

The post Do Rankings Mean Sales and Leads? appeared first on PrairieWeb Internet Marketing.