RICEinteractive » seo/ppc

Helping More Internet Customers Find You

Bill Rice — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:16:37 +0000

Customers Search to Buy

Do you even know what your Web URL is? Do your customers? Probably not, but that’s okay–assuming Google knows where it is.

Here is a quick test to see if we should be talking.

Go to Google
Be a customer looking for your products or services
Type in a search to find what you are looking for
No luck? Try again
…and again

Did any of those searches show your website? If you are like 95% of business I talk to, “No” is the answer.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engines are the number one way people find what they buy on the Internet. If you do not have a consistent strategy to market you products and services through these popular search engines you website is anonymous.

Without a search engine strategy your website is just another zombie, adding little value and invisible to consumers that want to buy.

A good Internet marketing campaign is one that consistently produces and distributes relevant, valuable, customer targeted content to the major search engines.

Improving Search Engine Rankings

Getting your business to show up in the search engines more frequently and higher in the search results is a steady process. Here are a few important elements to get you started:

Make sure your website has customer relevant content
Register with the search engines and local directories
Regularly update or generate news feeds on your website
Encourage other websites to link to yours for relevant topics

These kinds of activities tell Google, Bing, and Yahoo that your business website is a good, relevant, and current source of information about your products and services.

RICEinteractive SEO Services

Our SEO experts can help you move your business website into a leadership position. We can help you get the search results you want and attract the customers you need.

Call us at 734.775.4487 and help more customers find you.

Keyword Research-Blogging for Longtail Keywords

Bill Rice — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:22:40 +0000

Blogs are excellent tools for capturing strong longtail keywords. The incidental nature of blog posts and the broad topics covered draw longtail searches like flies to honey. This phenomenon, popping attractive keywords into my blog analytics, got me to thinking about creating longtail keyword honeypots as a regular part of my keyword research.

Turning Blogs into Longtail Honeypots

If you already have a blog you probably have noticed the attractive keywords searches that naturally stream in. This is the wonder of mildly focused, frequently posted, haphazard content and Google’s love affair with blogs.

The breadth and frequency of blog posts often open the filters and let us see search results obscured from our increasingly traffic engineered websites. This precisely the trickiness of creating an efficient process to draw in longtail keywords and not ruin the effectiveness of the technique.

Use Categories to Funnel Organic Traffic

The best way to get the right blend is to create a broad funnel. Start with a conscious topic area–a broad keyword. Then, much like you would with a domain, develop a good solid base of categories. However, maintain your normal non-SEO, informal blog-style content generation.

Some attempt to automate this process and get a little “blackhat” using a scrapper to seed keyword content into a splog.

Why I Don’t Advocate Scrapping

I tend to argue against this approach for a couple of practical reasons. Here are my reasons for maintaining my manual posting to these blogs:

Monetize your affiliate program content research with Adsense by blogging what you learn
Blogs can be great knowledge bases just waiting to be searched for future ideas
Buy a domain for each blog and make them domain aging outposts for future projects

Collecting the Longtail Keywords

Don’t forget to actually capture all this data. Blog stats packages are great for quick temperature checks on blogs, but put Google Analytics in place so you can do some serious keyword databasing.

Don’t leave the data idle–flip new longtails into your keyword research queue. The good ones should be flushed out into a PPC or Article Marketing campaign.

Expanding the Keyword Capture

Always be looking new keyword opportunities. As new search phrases come in see if there are opportunities to expand your categories or your posts to bring in more keywords.

Also, don’t forget to check your link backs and trackbacks. Yes, they will happen even on a keyword honeypot. These are great opportunities to find other concepts and categories you should be capturing.

Turning it Into Profit

Well, that is simple. Kick it into you normal keyword analysis or marketing program. Here are a few ideas:

Adsense on the blog itself
eBooks built on longtail clusters of interest
PPC campaigns
Article marketing topics

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Bill Rice is the Principle at RICE interactive, a leader in lead generating copywriting and social media. He is a frequent writer, speaker, and consultant on marketing and sales. He is passionate about helping organizations execute more profitable marketing and lead generation strategies.

If you have any questions–contact me: http://twitter.com/billrice

Headlines-Using Twitter to Test Headlines

Bill Rice — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 09:56:43 +0000

Twitter is a great way to test your headlines and short copy effectiveness. Hundreds of followers and a 140 characters maximum makes for a powerful marketing test environment. Twitter is a quick and efficient way to see if your headlines convert into clicks.

Article Library

Start with a good repository of articles. You should create a significant number of articles in a variety of topics. Good article diversity and quantity will ensure you have a ready-made test bed for a variety of projects.

This article library can be an article directory (eZineArticles), one or more blogs, or your website copy portfolio. Using your own blog or website gives you the added benefit of driving prospective business traffic too.

Since Twitter users, like most social networkers, don’t like constant self-promotion I suggest you routinely test using others websites, blogs, or articles as well as your own. The other authors will love the traffic, may link back to you, preserves your credibility, and it still achieves your conversion testing.

Tracking Conversions

Don’t forget the primary objective–tracking conversions. If you are using your own website or blog this is pretty simple–look at your blog stats or Google analytics. However, what about Tweets that you point at websites you don’t own?

In the past there was little opportunity to collect measurable results from these tests. You could use Summize to track keyword discussion and possibly track re-tweets. Unfortunately, this only measures buzz and typically has more to do with the destination content, not the headline. It doesn’t give you the core metric–do people click because of my copy?

Enter bit.ly Tweetburner, a new tiny URL technology that lets you track source and traffic through your shortened URL. So, now simply shorten and attach a unique bit.ly Tweetburner URL to each of your headline or short copy tests. Then you can track sources and volume of click-throughs.

Respect Your Audience

The quickest way to damage this excellent focus group is to abuse it. So, here are a few cautionary etiquette suggestions to keep yourself from poisoning the water:

Promote others, as well as yourself, with your headline tests
Stagger test headlines over various days
Make sure the destination content is interesting
Do not link your headline tests to sales letters or landing pages
Participate in the community too (ask questions and participate)

Happy Testing!

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If you have any questions–contact me: http://twitter.com/billrice