• Blogs provide fresh content on the site without having to update the otherwise static pages
• Blog posts are archived and can appear in the SERPs long after the post is published while Facebook posts are a flash in the pan
• Blog posts reach audiences that aren’t on Facebook (because there are consumers out there who don’t utilize the social network)
• Blog content is owned by the company who writes the blog, whereas Facebook content is owned and monitored by Facebook
• Blog posts dig into details while Facebook posts are short and sweet. A short Facebook post can promote a longer blog entry

Blogs are useful for maintaining positive client relationships. You already have loyal clientele, but they like to be reminded that you are the right person for the task. Your blog posts establish your credibility and experience, and reassure your clients that you are in fact the best solution for their concerns. While Facebook posts connect you with your customers on a personal level, blog posts consistently emphasize your worth. Blogs promote trust, Facebook posts promote interaction. Both must be a part of your marketing strategy if you want to obtain, and maintain, a wide net of clientele.

For more information, download our Blogging for Business white paper.

To build trust, consistently create valuable content. Your pages should not state why your services are the best, but should demonstrate that your company is knowledgeable on the problems they are seeking solutions for. Company blogs should not sell anything, but should emphasize your understanding of client needs. Customers will come back if they navigate a site that contains useful content.

Understanding Your Visitors’ Intent

To understand your visitors, strive to define the issue they are confronted with. Search Engine Land suggests that when analyzing the statistics in your search funnel, you should track downloads, signups and registrations more than conversions. Analyze how your customers are navigating your site instead of whether they purchased anything or not. As stated earlier, customers rarely buy on their first visit, but if you give them a reason to come back (through valuable content), they may bookmark your page and purchase later.

Last point to keep in mind is to understand where your customers are in the buying cycle. If they are in their research phase, For Entrepreneurs states that it’s best to find a creative way to obtain their email address so you can send them newsletters and content that helps them solve their issue. As your customers continue research, they will remember your company because you continuously provide solutions even when they are not asking. If customers are in the purchase phase, you want to make it easy for them to contact you for services. Avoid long forms and difficult navigation. If they are interested, they need your site to direct them in the easiest way possible.

Building trust with your clientele is how you sell in the online world. Sales pitches are uncomfortable for the client. They shouldn’t feel pressured to buy your services through sales pitches filled with empty promises. Let your content demonstrate your expertise and let your interactions show that you care about solving their problem.

How can you optimize your site for semantic search? Review your site for its current approach to content, backlinks, and social media.

Content

Pages containing well-written, useful, and relevant content always rank higher than shoddy content. Especially now that semantic search is coming in to play, you will need to construct your content around the user thought process. Your content should anticipate the user’s questions and provide the information they seek.

Backlinks

With the advancement of semantic search, high-quality and relevant backlinks are essential to maintain a top ranking position in the SERPs. Earn your backlinks through quality channels like guest blogging, press releases, customer comments and social media platforms.

Google Plus

You can challenge the semantic search results through a powerful social media presence – particularly through an active Google Plus account. Google Plus is attempting to obtain a beloved spot in the social media space, trying desperately to compete with Facebook and Twitter. Naturally Google is rewarding sites that are adopting Google Plus. Build a complete social media presence that demonstrates your knowledge about your industry and that shares quality content with your followers and circles. Establishing a spot in the social media space ensures that your site and services are still found in Google and on other social media platforms.

Google is changing their search algorithm from keyword based to semantic search, focusing on the relationships between keywords to better understand user intent. If you are bidding on keywords, yet you are not what the user is seeking, you won’t rank. Consider these three tactics to stay on top of the evolving semantic search results.

Sometimes, so-called best practices aren’t always best, so it’s essential to consistently tweak and test your landing pages. Some landing page tactics we recommend:

• Focus on one objective per page. Customers leave landing pages with multiple options. Use one landing page per product/service.
• Use clear and concise language. Directly state the action customers need to take.
• Create powerful headlines. Headlines are your first impression, and dynamic headlines compel customers to click.
• Write in the second-person. Landing pages are not about you. It’s imperative to explain how your products/services benefit your customers.
• Avoid navigational bars. Customers will visit your website if they want more information, so don’t force them to navigate when they consider purchasing.
• Avoid redirect links. Redirect links should lead customers to somewhere useful, so only use redirect links to supplement the content. (e.g. testimonials and reviews)
• Include essential information in the first and last paragraphs. Explain the benefits of your products/services in the introduction. Remind your customers why they will benefit in the conclusion. Now your customers recognize the perks of doing business with you.
• Be consistent with colors and visuals. Customers like consistency because it tells them that your advertisement directed them to the correct page, so use the same text colors and visuals in both the advertisement and the landing page.
• Include design elements above the fold. Essential buttons and content and calls to action must be above the fold for easy navigation.
• Test landing pages. Use search funnels to gain insight into how your landing pages perform. Adjust layout and content until customers start buying.

New research released by Google in February 2012 states that 41% of smartphone users have purchased items directly from their mobile devices, meaning you will need audience-constructed landing pages optimized for desktops, tablets, and mobile devices if you want to stand out from the competition. Creating powerful headlines, writing clear call-to-actions, and consistently redesigning and testing landing page layout will expel the term bounce rate from your SEM vocabulary.

Need landing page help? Here at Be Found Online, we have more than qualified SEM experts who can create effective landing pages for your needs. So give us a call today and we can turn your bounce rates into conversions.

• Identify the full value of traffic coming from social sites and measure how they lead to direct conversions or assist in future conversions
• Understand social activities happening both on and off of your site to help you optimize user engagement and increase social key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Make better, more efficient data-driven decisions in your social media marketing programs

We’re hoping that the reports will be fully functional right out of the gate, and you bet we’ll put them to the test as soon as we have access. In the meantime, check out our official Google Analytics Social Reporting Point of View (POV) where we share tips businesses can use to prepare for latent lead tracking from their social media marketing efforts.

• Competitive personalities are fast and logical. They want to be the first to have everything and prefer instant information as opposed to having to click through several links.
• Methodical personalities are slow and logical. They must thoroughly understand the product details prior to purchasing a product.
• Spontaneous personalities are fast and emotional. They like to shop clearance but they do not need an abundance of information to make a decision. They rely more on how the item makes them feel.
• Humanistic personalities are slow and emotional. They value customer reviews more than product details.

Based on the varying buyer preferences, it’s time to consider targeting these four personalities when crafting paid search ad copy. Each customer responds differently based on landing page and advertising content and design. To target all personalities through one landing page, provide a product image (Spontaneous), include thorough product details (Methodical), customer reviews (Humanistic), and use one link that sends users to the purchase process (Competitive).

For effective ads that compel all personalities to click, combine product extensions (Spontaneous), advertiser rankings (Humanistic), and concise ad copy (Competitive, Methodical). Not sure which personality to target? We suggest you create ad copy for each different personality type and track which ad copy produced the highest click through and conversion rates.

Creating landing pages and advertisements specifically designed to provide information that corresponds for each personality type increases conversion rates dramatically. Targeting personalities will revolutionize the way businesses market to consumers.

A majority of these changes improve data usability and navigation design, so we can access crucial search information quickly and easily.  We expect that the GA changes will improve communication with our clients so they can clearly understand the value of their search marketing dollars, envisioning the short term and long term strategies we put in place to improve their campaigns. When that happens, we all win.

Screenshot of the new Google Analytics interface.

According to the official Google Search Blog, “We continue to improve many of our systems, including related searches, sitelinks, autocomplete, UI elements, indexing, synonyms, SafeSearch and more. Each individual change is subtle and important, and over time they add up to a radically improved search engine.”

While most of these changes deal with general search functionality including less duplication in expanded sitelinks, more locally relevant predictions in searches, and removal of outdated algorithms, many affect Google’s international audience. Other changes affect results on YouTube and Hulu and Google Places.

Two important changes that will affect SEO efforts: Google has changed the way they evaluate links to determine the topic of a linked page, and they have fixed some weaknesses in their spam protection. If your website using black hat techniques to reach the top of the SERPs, it may be time to implement a white hat plan.

First we must understand why Twitter is targeting small business owners, and actually, the answer is quite simple. Twitter wants to increase advertising revenue and they know that most business owners cannot afford to advertise, excluding the Fortune 500 companies of course. Twitter wants to make their new advertising platform user friendly, more targeted, and much cheaper so all business owners who have a desire to advertise can without the large financial burden. Also, Twitter has realized that it will make more money by allowing cheaper services to several small business owners than relying solely on the Fortune 500 companies who can pay for advertising. And, simply put, if this new advertising platform is successful, it could boost the Twitter stock prices.

So what does this new platform mean for small business owners? It all depends on who your target customers are. For instance, if your targeted users are not using Twitter, it may be pointless to try this new platform. However, if a majority of your customers are active Twitter users, and the potential customers you want are active tweeters, you should at least try this small business advertising platform. It all depends on where your customers are interacting.

For one of the trial small business owners, the Twitter advertising platform has been a success! Glennz Tees, based in Austin Texas, tested the platform in late 2011 and had the successful experience they were hoping for! In December of 2011, their sales have doubled from the previous year, and their followers have tripled to 22,000. So for them, it has worked. But Twitter is still testing the waters. They want to ensure that this platform is effective before allowing non-American Express users to utilize it.

So how will Twitter make money off of your advertisements? They call it CPE, Cost-per-Engagement, and they will only charge you when you are followed, or when your advertisements are selected or retweeted.  Before, companies were charged for retweets, replies, clicks or when your tweet was favored. Now Twitter has made their advertising cheaper by removing the charges for replies and favorites to accommodate the small business owners.

So why consider Twitter for advertising? In 2011, social networking accounted for nearly one out of every five minutes spent online globally. Even more shocking, social media surpassed porn as the number one activity on the web! So what is the point of these two stats? To illustrate the impact social media has on users throughout the world. How do these stats relate to this post? Twitter is a social networking site and there is a high chance that your customers are actively using Twitter. But research to make sure your target users are on Twitter before you start spending money on customers who aren’t there. After all, if you are not an American Express user, you have until late March to decide if this platform is right for you. And if it is, your business should consider it.

The first step is to create an AdCenter account, if you haven’t already. AdCenter will take you through the usual sign-up process, credit card information and so on. Once you are set up and on the main dashboard, click “create campaign.” The usual process of creating campaigns comes first, meaning name the campaign, choose your budget, enter time zone, etc.

One important aspect to note when using AdCenter is that there are two steps that must be completed. First, you must choose the area you want to target. Second, you must complete the ad group distribution field. Targeting, which allows you to advertise to any specific age and gender, is when you choose the area you plan to send ads to. Ad group distribution factors include the platform where your ads will appear and the language in which your ads will be written.

Now it’s time to target!

So, do you want your ads to one specific area? Or do you want your ads for the entire region? Once you decide on whether you want to target one specific area or distribute to an entire area speaking a specific language, you can follow through with the rest of the process of creating an ad campaign.

After you have finished creating the ad campaign, double check to make sure that everything is correct and in order. After you are satisfied with your ad copy, budget, keywords, and target audience, you select finish. One key point to remember about ad groups is that once you click finish, the ad group is final. If you’ve made a mistake, you must delete the ad group and create a new one.

And that’s it! It’s as simple as that. Now you can target audiences all over the world from your own computer. Remember, in Hotmail is Still Hot we discussed the new features that AdCenter has implemented to create a more effective overall ad campaign experience. Utilize those features for an overall satisfactory advertising experience. So get out there and start targeting! Advertise to those international users and watch your revenue shoot through the roof!

AdCenter sounds effective but if you prefer assistance when creating ad campaigns and targeting international users? Our SEM team is stacked with AdCenter experts, so give us a call today if you would like some help targeting your international audience.