Author: troy

  • Online Marketing – Let Customers Customize the Offering.

    As the internet and technology in general become more sophisticated, consumers want to be able to tailor a product to meet their exact needs. So it makes sense to allow them to do this on your website. Again here are some example from fast growing companies who use their website as an important business tool.

    Ecowash mobile are a simple car washing company. But on their website, when you become a client you are able to use its features to make washing your car more simple. For example you can customise your own twelve month plan and set email reminders as to when you should wash both the inside or outside of your car. You can even reorder air fresheners and similar products on a recurring basis.

    Intrepid Travel are working on a system that will delegate a unique URL to it’s clients. This URL will allow them to create a profile which will make it easy to source detailed travel information, tips and inspiration, tailored to the details they enter. Travel brands will be able to send them relevant offers, stories, specials and so on, if the client meets their target demographic.

    A leading online store in Australia, Baby Cupcakes designed their website in a way to help them upsell to their clients. As the client checks out and all their details are taken, add on products to their baby gifts are offered. Physical retails stores all do this, but it is mostly under used in the online market. On their site you can choose colours, smells, write a gift message, add names to products and more.

    There are many ways each business can make their website more appealing to their clients. Even on our SEM or SEO website, we try to separate visitors according to their previous online marketing experience.

    As web 2.0 becomes more and more the expected level of online service, it is important that your website also interacts with your visitor and makes their time on your site seem more worthwhile.

  • SEO BLOG – Email Marketing

    Many of the leading entrepreneurs are compiling databases of their clients and send them regular Email newsletters. The purpose of these newsletters varies from marketing, introducing new products, cross selling and educating their existing client base. Both retailers and wholesalers are realising the benefit of ethical email marketing. Newsletters can also be used to inform people of upcoming events like seminars or trade shows.

    To build a database smart website owners use a variety of strategies, but basically, wherever anyone enters there details on their website, they are captured into the database. This database is often seperated into different categories, such as clients, prospective clients, etc. Each contact category can then be sent targeted information about your company. It is important to use a quality email marketing program that tesracks the results of each email you send and streamlines the emailing process. A good one that i recommend can be found at http://www.newslettermarketing.com.au

    David Markus says his company, Combo, have used email marketing to entice clients to seminars and to nurture warm leads. He says the world is always starving for better communication tools and ethical email marketing is currently always improving. They are currently planning the next twelve months of an email campaign that will establish them as a forward thinking company and will give them an edge over their competitors.

    The WBP Property Group uses their email newsletters to contact their database of prospective home buyers and property developers. Their goal is to educate these people in the advantages of engaging an experienced consultant for both developments and finance issues. He says the success of the campaign has greatly increased their new client base.

    In the retail sector, Ryan Winney from Infiniti uses email marketing to keep his clients up to speed with new fitness products and lets them know when stocks are running low. This way, he ensures the retailers in his area are better informed about his products and it helps him remain the leading salesperson in his company.

    Lastly, we all know spam is annoying, so it is important to keep emails for marketing to only quality, relevent information and offers. Spam filters are improving, however with legitimate content to a targeted audience, your open and follow rates from email marketing should remain high. By monitoring your email effectiveness rates through a good newsletter program, you can establish the most succesful types of emails and even the best days to send them.

    As an online marketing company, not just an SEO company, we use this form of marketing ourselves with ever improving results.

    In the next post of this series of tips from leading entrepreneurs, I will chat about upselling online and letting customers customise their purchase. Good SEO should have the goal of making more money from your website, not just more visitors, so I think this is an important topic for those seeking SEO services, or any online marketing advice.

    Until then, have fun.

  • Internet Strategies – Educate Them

    Smart entrepreneurs have discovered that there are a lot of benefits from educating people online. This can occur on a number of levels from your website, and should often be a key element of your websites marketing strategy.

    Firstly there is the opportunity to educate your potential client visitors. This increases your chance of a sale and reduces time spent selling by you personally or by your sales staff. Your website gives you the chance to answer the often asked questions before you interact with your customer on a personal level.

    Other groups you can educate are your retailers, franchisees and suppliers. Ecowash Mobile for example have used the technology on their website to streamline their franchisee recruitment process by providing all the required information online. Prospective franchisees can log in and access data on their possible territory, statistics and more. Jim Cornish says “We estimate the educational functions of our website complete functions that would usually require two full time staff members.”

    Xpresso Delight also use their website to educate their franchisees. They have a secure area which contains all of their manuals, and operating procedures, along with company literature, to help build the efficiency and sales techniques of their staff. They also operate a database where franchisees can enter their weekly reports, track performance and set future goals.

    They also have a function where they record how many coffees are made by each machine. This info is then used to establish how much coffee, chocolate powder, take away cups etc. that they need to order. This save them time stocktacking and ordering, because it is done automatically.

    These same ideas can be used to educate retailers too. New products, events, promotions and many other things can be available to your retailers at a low cost to your retailers through your website.

    I know this series is drifting a bit away from the SEO, that we are famous for, but I think their is so much more to online marketing than the niche we operate in. So I am always interested to explore anything that will increase the value of a website.

    The next post in this series will be about E-Mail marketing. I have been receiving more and more Email marketing lately, mostly in russian or some language from another planet. Thanks to the contact form on our website. So i will discuss the fun involved with that and on a more serious note, how to make money through responsible email marketing and newsletters.

    Until then…enjoy your day.

  • Entrepreneur Tips – Get found on Google.

    This is the third in a series of thirteen tips created by some of Australias most successful entrepeneurs. These people have grown their business rapidly and share the main goals they would have when it comes to marketing most types of businesses.

    Todays tips is simple, get found on Google. Search engine optimisation or SEO, is our businesses core strength so this strategy I of course endorse whole heartedly. But i will stick to what other successful business people have recommended and keep my personal thought to myself for this post.

    Smart business people have one aim when it comes to Google. Get on the first page for relevent searches.

     Matthew Nolan from Provident Cashflow, says they originally targeted all search engines when they began marketing their business online. However, they analysed their return and now focus all of their energy on Google. "That was where we were getting the highest ROI". They also appreciate the fact that their potential clients can self educate themselves to a degree through their website. Their visitors navigate around the pages and learn more about the industry and what his business offers. This often saves them time on the phone with new calls, explaining the basics. He added that this was a big benefit to other advertising strategis like radio or print ads.

    Paul Constantinou, founder of the Quest Apartments, says his main online focus is search engine optimisation and pay per click advertising. The benefit for him is that this has enabled him not only to get bookings, but also build his brand and increase awareness of his properties.

    Sarah Allen is very frank about their advertising techniques. She says that Appliance Tagging Services have moved away from ineffective and expensive Yellow Pages Online and print advertising and now focus on search engines for generating new business. As a new industry (if you are not in construction) they find the majority of their business comes from people researching information about what their obligations are in regards to appliance tagging. So they give them the answers they are looking for and provide a way for them to easily get the job done. It is fast becoming their largest source of new clients.

    I could also list another hundred clients we have experienced rapid business growth with due to search engine optimisation. But as I said, i will stick to the research article i am sharing.

    The next post is about educating your suppliers, retailers and franchisees to maximise profits.

  • SEO Strategies – Going Global

    Following up from yesterdays post about different online strategies being used by many top entrepreneurs, the next point is about going global.

    One of the biggest advantages of an online presence is that it is accessible from all over the globe. This has always been promoted as one of the key positives of the internet in general, reaching a global audience. Your SEO and other online marketing can also still be managed from home too, reducing your need to involve foreign companies to be involved with advertising and promotions.

    As development software becomes more and more advanced, smart marketers are always improving the targetting of their websites based on where a visitor is coming from. This includes the local language, local news and information and products that are more suited to certain cultures, trends and living standards in different countries.

    Global targetting can also help a website be found on Google, because you can tell Google what content of a website is appropriate to a certain country and that they should include in that countries search engine indexing.

    Leigh Jasper from Aconex, which is a software company, says that his website detects where a user is from based on their ip address. They can then show localised content to these people so it is always more relevant and interesting to them. This includes case studies of local clients, which helps establish them as local suppliers in many markets.

    For E-Commerce stores, this type of approach also allows you to display products in the local currency so no confusion about currency conversions will be made. This also increases the buyer confidence in your products as they have a more local feel.

    There are different options available, by either using domains specific to different countries or have one website with seperate sub-domains based on the countries you wish to position yourself in. The later is probably better from an SEO point of view, because all of your effort can be focused on just one website.

    If you would like to share experiences marketing to foreign countries online, feel free to share them here.

  • Online Strategies – Become a Thought Leader

    After reading an article on the fastest growing entrepeneurs the other day i have decided to summarize some of the main strategies or ideas shared by the more web savvy entrepeneurs mentioned. The first point I want to raise, or first strategy is this.

    Become a Thought Leader.

    For businesses turning to the internet as their main source of lead generation or chief sales tool, many online entrepeneurs say it is important to become the thought leader in your industry. By thought leader they mean that you should be active in the emerging forms of online marketing. These entrepeneurs are busy submitting white papers, writing blogs, leaving comments on forums, contributing professional articles to information sites, writing press releases.

    There are two reasons that Kareem Tawansi from Solventine does this. Firstly there is the SEO,SEM benefits of creating new links from different sources besides just directories. The other is that fresh content on their site gives visitors something new when they come back. They aim to create innovative and original ideas about their industry and share these via interesting articles or essays.

    The main goal of their website is lead generation. Combining the benefits of more visitors both from direct clicks from their resources and increased Google rankings, with more intersting fresh content, the amount of leads they get through their website has continued to grow.

    David Markus from an IT company called Combo, uses a different strategy. He creates a lot of white papers or articles about the questions he is often faced with when prospecting new clients. This info is available on their website and in different forms on blogs, forums, article sites etc. By providing the answers to his potential clients questions before he speaks with them, he finds their credibility increased and the sale made easier.

    Finally Les Katz from, Lift Shop, says the her online strategy was simple. They promoted themselves to be their industries resource centre. She said their goal was to provide loads of information, anything people might want to know about their industry. This continuous fresh content both on and off page has secured them both authoritative search engine rankings for their targetted phrases aswell as many long tail phrases too. Nobody in their industry has more visitors than they do.

    Visitor activity on your site is all monitored by Google and other search engines too, it plays an important role in both SEO and affects the cost of your Adwords campaign.. If people find what they are looking for and stay longer, search engines will want to show your site. Creative original content is a great way to do this.

    So be brave and start to promote your business as a thought leader.

  • SEO Results – When to turn off Adwords.

    Often a question we are asked by our SEO clients is “how long do you think it will be before I can turn off my Adwords.” This is because many people new to SEO have been using Adwords in the past and want to reduce their long term cost, while still receiving the same or preferably more visitors without this cost.

    That is a nice idea on the surface but if you are serious about getting the most visitors to your site as possible, and your Adwords is well managed, should you really be considering turning it off at all?

    There is one advantage that Adwords listings have over the majority or organic responses on Google. That advantage is a strong call to action. You can make your Adwords as racey as you like and very specific to the search term being used, so this will always help attract some more people to your website. You can target them with specific info for every product you sell.

    Further to this you can bring them directly to the relevant page to the product they are looking for, saving time and clicks. So while I do not argue that organic sites on Google have a higher conversion percentage than from Adwords (depending of course on the quality of your site and its engagement strategies) for the aggressive businessman, this has to be seen as a marketing benefit. Especially when compared to no space on Adwords at all.

    Another thing to consder is this. It is impossible for you to rank at the top of Google for every keyphrase relevant to you business. And as the organic market gets more and more competitive, fluctuations in rankings are happening more often. So Adwords can be used to support your Organic rankings for keyphrases you are not found naturally on and as a backup for those you are.

    If you want to lead the way on Google in your industry, most often a well optimised SEO campaign running in conjunction with a well managed PPC campaign is the way to go. With every improving tracking and diagnostic tools readily available, it is easier and easier to manage your ROI from both strategies and maximise your profits.

    What do you reckon about this?

  • SEO Friendly Domain Names

    Often when businesses are registering their domain names, they think very little about what they choose. The obvious choice is that the name of your business will also be the domain name of your website. While it does make perfect sense to register your business name as a domain, before someone else does, it is often just as important to register domains as similar as possible to the phrases you would like to be found on Google for.

    Let’s say you make fridge magnets for a living and your business is called ‘Positive Charge”. Along with registering the domain name,positivecharge.com.au you should also be registering fridgemagnets.com.au. If it is available that is. The next best domain would be fridge-magnets.

    But what do you do with the business name domain or in this case positivefridgemagnet.com.auThere are a few options. You could just make it redirect to fridgemagnets, so people who type your business name directly still come to your sales site. Or you could make a small site with information about your products with links to the sales site. You could make it also a sales site. However what you do not want to do is make the two sites identical. The content that will be duplicated just makes it difficult from an seo point of view to get either of them ranking well.

    This also makes sense. The aim of Google is to provide fresh content from a variety of sources. Why would it want to rank the same thing twice, how will that benefit the user. Google also tries to rank the original or authoritative source of duplicat content higher than the repeats. If it can not distinguish which is which, this can cause confusion for both Google and the person trying to rank your site.

    This is pretty common knowledge that I am sharing. It is very likely that the sort of domains I am mentioning when applied to your business are already taken. Consider adding your business name and the keyphrase you want to be found for together. Something like pcfridgemagnets or positivefridgemagnets could apply to the case above.

    If there are a variety of niche products or services you offer that lots of people search for, consider creating more than one website and target each one on your specific product or service. This will give you more chances to rank for more of your target phrases. The user generally doesn’t care about branding and things like that as long as you are offering what they want clearly, professionally and it is easy to buy or call or whatever. SEO Friendly domain names can be very important to boost your business.

    Let me know if you agree or disagree with these points.

  • How SEO works

    I think it is important that people who are new to SEO realise what results they can expect from a good SEO campaign and what would be considered normal throughout a dedicated SEO effort.

    Firstly i would like to point out that SEO is a long term strategy. It is not usually responsible to be told or think that more traffic will come to your website quickly, there are other online strategies if that is your goal.

    It is generally considered best practice for the on page optimisation to take place on your website at the beginning of an optimisation campaign. The goal with this is to make it clear to Google what it is you want to be found for or what it is you are offering. Depending on if you have a new site, how old your existing site is or the program it has been built by, this will take between a few hours or a few weeks. If your SEO consultant is familiar with your system it will be faster. And if there is a lot of work to be done, like seo copy writing or restructuring from an seo friendly system it will take longer.

    But often within the first month or so you should have seen some initial improvement to your rankings. This might not be true if your site already ranks quite highly, or has had some elements to it Google considers unethical. A slight slip in rankings can also be normal in these cases.

    When the onpage work has been done the emphasis switches to link building. The more other websites that have an inbound link to yours, the better. Creating these links is an ongoing process for your seo consultant and they should be submitting maybe twenty links a day at least a few days per week.

    The majority of sites SEO experts submit links to are not intended to increase your rankings and will often not even be intended to receive much traffic themselves. So don not count on this inbound linking to open up new avenues for clients to find you.

    Usually month two is the hardest from an SEO clients point of view. After an initial rise in rankings from the onpage work and a few good links, it is common to get excited and expect contiuous improvements. Sometimes you can be lucky and this will happen but more often than not the second month will not generate big improvements.

    The reason for this is that first a link request is submitted. Then it has to be reviewed by the website owner, which can take minutes or months and is beyond your seo persons control. Unless you ant to pay for links which guarantees a quicker approval of your link. So then your link is up and you have to wait for Google to discover that link exists and add it to your websites index. And this has to happen over and over again.

    After a month or two the link building 'gains traction' and more consistent ranking improvements will likely follow. Other ways to encourage more links include article submissions, forum and blog marketing and press releases. All of which can be time consuming but a dedicated SEO person will do this, much more likely if you supply articles for them.

    If your SEO person is good, you can expect to be pushing the top ten within some months, depending on how competitive your industry is on search engines. The strength of your competition will then be the main factor for how long it takes to get a good traffic generating position at or near the top.

    What i think if you are suspicous if your SEO person is busy or not, is to ask them questions. What have they done for your site this week? can they show you anything about where links are being built? What are their plans for the next weeks? Why do they think the rankings are not rising?

    Good answers should be provided if they take your result personally and are dedicated to seeing your site rank very well.

    Finally, I recommend trying to stay upbeat about what is going on. If your SEO consultant has to build links for you on a daily basis, you want them to have a positive image of you in their mind. If they like you, they will be much more likely to have passion for your project. If you have not met them before and you think they are going stale on your project, why not organise to meet up with them and show them your face. Buy them a coffee, help them understand your business more. I have seen this reignite passion in SEO projects many times before.

    Hope that all makes sense and is not to much of a mish mash of ideas.

    Troy

  • SEO For Gift Shops

    Selling your products online is an excellent way to reach a much wider audience than you can from a traditional shop. With the huge amount of search online and the ever increasing trust associated with online shopping, more and more gift shops are also releasing online stores. And SEO for gift shops is becoming more competitive.

    As this continues to increase, the competition to get more visitors to your website becomes more and more fierce. On Australian search engines, Google now completely dominates with over 80% or search traffic turning to Google. This is not a new realisation, so many people have made a dedicated effort to be found in prominent positions on Google when someone searches for the type of gifts they sell.

    To come to the top of Google for generic phrases such as ‘gifts’ or ‘gift ideas’ has become very difficult. It will be time consuming to do this yourself or expensive to hire a professional. To tell you the truth though, there is a much better way to get good traffic to your site from Google faster.

    Every store has the gifts they specialise in. Whether it is ‘kids gifts’, ‘AFL gifts’, ‘wine gifts’ or whatever. By narrowing down your target market into such niche gift types you will not only greatly increase the likeliness of success from an seo campaign but also shorten that amount of time waiting to get a return on your investment.

    Another benefit is that if someone is searching for say an ‘AFL Gift’, they are much further through their buying process and more likely to make a purchase, or at least find what they are looking for.

    Of course Google Adwords is another option but it is even more risky. You could spend huge amounts of money to have a sponsored link for a term like ‘Gifts’ and make very few sales. It is too broad a term for any gift shop. You will surely be paying for many people to come to your website who are totally not interested in what you are selling. I am actually suprised that so many people bid for such a term.

    The benefit that can be gained from a very high organic ranking on Google is huge. I have seen different online retail stores grow from home based businesses to very large companies in a short space of time. Most of them have realised their target market, done in depth ‘keyphrase research’ and attacked the niche keywords relevant to what they sell.

    SEO for gift shops is very exciting. Once you get to the first page you almost always see an increase in visitors and sales, more with every position you climb. As with every market though the competition will continue to increase. So the longer people wait the more difficult it will get. Clever online gift store owners are already making a lot of money through quality SEO.

    To ask any questions or leave a comment, feel free to do so here.