It’s a question that I am often asked by my clients who are looking to launch their digital marketing strategy: should they focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Pay-Per-Click (SEM, PPC)?

Too many people are under the impression that their online marketing presence should be guided by one strategy or the other.  I’m here to tell you that the most effective digital marketing strategies take a blended approach, using components of both tactics.

SEO and SEM strategies are complementary ways of achieving the same goal: prominent inclusion in search engine results that lead to traffic to your website.  However, while each is effective and critical tools in your digital marketing arsenal, they each have unique principles that can help you reach your objectives.  Let’s take a look.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the tactic of using your site’s content, linking structure, blog posts, and social media exposure (amongst other things) to help you rank organically in search engine results. Search engines take all of these cues into consideration when deciding where to rank your site in their results for a particular keyword, like “auto insurance in Rhode Island”. SEO is the critical foundation to your website’s visibility in search engine results. The things that you do to optimize your online content and relationships will have a long-lasting effect on your rankings in search engines.  However, those effects, while critically important, might take a long time to take hold in the search results.  Google indexes your content at its own pace, and the general rule of thumb that search engine marketers go by is that it can take between six and nine months before you begin to realize the results of your on-site optimization.

On the other hand, SEM has more of an immediate impact. Once you build a campaign that targets your specific keyword set, and you set that campaign live, you are eligible to see an instant impact on your traffic and visibility in search engines.  While inclusion in organic search results are merit based, your SEM campaign can force Google (or any other search engine) to place you within the top results of some competitive keywords.  With that newfound visibility, your website is bound to see traffic increase.  That’s what the pay-per-click model does for marketers.   However, the effects of your SEM campaign are not as long lasting as your SEO strategy – that is, unless you have an unlimited marketing budget.  You see, your site is guaranteed inclusion in search engine results for only as long as your campaign is funded.  As soon as your campaign has generated enough clicks to exhaust your budget, your traffic will stop.  The great thing about SEM is that it is a guaranteed source of traffic – if people aren’t clicking on your ad and visiting your site, you don’t pay a cent!

Now that we’ve reviewed the different characteristics of SEO and SEM strategies, it is important to note how they work together.  In fact, our best e-agencies have told us that the best performing digital marketing strategy leverages both SEM and SEO in tandem.  This blended strategy has helped them appeal to a broad and comprehensive audience, and has resulted in their website being a more prominent piece of customer acquisition.

Here are three reasons why you should have SEO and SEM as part of your site’s digital marketing strategy:

These are just three reasons for you use SEO and SEM in a blended strategy.  Doing so will give you a well-rounded digital marketing presence, and likely drive enhanced search engine traffic as a result. Stay tuned to this space for more reasons why you should focus on a blended approach to digital marketing.

If you are heading to Foxboro for playoff football or to any of the remaining cities still in the hunt for the Super Bowl, you need to be prepared!

If you are one of the crazies that tailgates in an RV, modified school bus, or other crazy vehicle- make sure you know exactly how many people can safely ride in your tailgating-mobile. Some vehicles, such as school busses require a Commercial Driver’s License. Make sure you are driving to the game with the right license. You will also want to check the vehicle’s safety equipment. Check the seat belts, air brake system, airbags system and tires, to make sure the vehicle is in good working condition. The last thing you want to do is to get into an accident due to a non-working safety feature!

If you are a fan who likes to tow your tailgating equipment, make sure you know what you are doing! Towing can be a great way to transport items, but it can also be a dangerous if you don’t do it correctly. Make sure your cargo is balanced and secured. Also check the tire’s load rating for the amount of weight the tires can carry safely, and maintain the correct tire pressure.  Some states require special permits for towing. Check with your local DMV to find out the regulations and laws in your state.

Once you are at the game, you never know what could go wrong. You should always take a first aid kit, garbage bags, change of clothes, fire extinguisher, water and ice packs in case of an emergency. These should be in your tailgating vehicle for each and every game you attend.

Make sure when it’s time to go home, the driver has not been drinking. If you have had too much to drink at the game, don’t try to drive home. Be safe and call a friend or a taxi for a ride. Not that it happens much at Gillette Stadium, but sometimes people actually do drink too much while caught up in all the excitement!

Finally, make sure your vehicle is properly insured. If you have ever tried to get out of Foxboro after a game, you know what a stressful and potentially dangerous situation it is. If your tailgating vehicle is not properly insured, you are asking for trouble if you get into an accident. Stay safe, have fun, and make it home without a hitch.

Last week Google released information about another algorithm change that will have an effect on their search results. Their algorithm is an intricate set of instructions and functions that helps Google determine how certain sites should rank in the SERPs, or search engine results pages. Precisely how the Google algorithms work is highly confidential but every once in a while we’ll catch a glimmer of insight into what Google is looking for from us.

The current algorithm update is focused on the freshness of content on the web – it’s being referred to as the “Freshness Update”. Google wants to gear their search results toward the most relevant AND up to date information available. This is not a new initiative for Google, but simply an improvement to their ongoing efforts. Google reports that the percentage of effected queries has doubled, meaning that 35% of searches will now see fresher results.

So, what does this mean for you?

For those of you who are clients of Astonish Results, you’ve heard over and over again how important and beneficial it is to be involved in blogging and social media. Our nagging is being reinforced by this Google algorithm update. Keeping up with your blogging and social media efforts is the easiest way to continuously send updated content to the web. So log into your onsite blog and make sure you’re giving Google what they want – fresh and exciting content!

Bringing it back to the basics, the search engines are looking to provide searchers with the best experience possible. So whether you are trying to keep up with Google’s algorithm updates or are looking for best practice tips from Bing’s webmaster guidelines, it’s important to make the needs of searchers a priority. If you’re providing searchers with up to date, useful information then you have a solid platform to build off of.

When optimizing your website for the search engines, a good starting point is to work with a basic recipe. You want to optimize your content with good keywords, follow the webmaster guidelines established by the search engines, format your content and links so they can be easily crawled by the search spiders, and implement an integrated strategy including blogging and social media that will help catapult your site toward the top of the search results.

It’s Halloween, so I want to have a little fun today. Some furry friends are going to help me tell the story of a basic SEO strategy. I hope you enjoy these photos as much as I have!

Find and optimize your content with long tail keywords that will help you emphasize your specialized focus.

Your content should be user friendly. You need to avoid the use of ghostly tactics such as hidden text.

You want to be sure your site uses the proper keyword linking strategies so the search spiders will deem your content worth a high ranking in the search engines.

Make sure you read up on and are compliant with webmaster guidelines to avoid being penalized.

Implement an integrated strategy with blogging, social media and linking that will help your keyword strength and web presence bloom.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

There’s no way around it – Google is the head honcho of the search engine world. If we want our websites to show up in the search results (and stay there) we need to acknowledge Google’s webmaster guidelines. While we may not follow these guidelines to the T, it’s clear that following Google’s suggested best practices will mean a healthier life-cycle for our sites.
Google breaks down their guidelines into three main sections: Design and Content Guidelines, Technical Guidelines, and Quality Guidelines. Let’s take a look at what Google wants from each category.

Design and Content Guidelines

• Easy to Navigate
• Provide useful, relevant content
• Keep the number of links on each page to a reasonable number
• Include appropriate keywords in your content

Technical Guidelines

• Test your site to be sure it displays correctly in different browsers.
• Optimize your site speed and performance
• Regularly monitor your site’s performance
• Allow search spiders to crawl your sites without session IDs

Quality Guidelines

• Don’t try to trick your users or the web with cloaking (presenting different content to the search engines than you users).
• Avoid tricks to improve search rankings.
• Don’t take part in link schemes

Specific Quality Guidelines

• Avoid hidden text and links
• Don’t use cloaking
• Don’t create multiple pages or sub-domains with duplicate content
• Don’t fill your content with irrelevant keywords

Overall, Google wants websites to provide unique, useful and relevant information on sites that are easy to use – the end goal being happy searchers. This was verified with their recent Panda update which focused on increasing the exposure of sites with quality content. As we always say here at Astonish Results, quality content is king.

Bloggers Beware: Five Common Writing Errors to Look Out For

In today’s fast-paced world, online writers are expected to be able to pump out fresh and informative content on a regular basis. Furthermore, it is essential that this content is readable, shareable and correct. People who blog for their business carry a lot of responsibility since every piece of work they publish can reflect on the credibility of their company.

As all writers know – whether they publish online or in print – it’s all too easy for mistakes to slip through the cracks and make their way into a final copy. However, simply being aware of some of the most frequently made errors may be enough for bloggers who want to avoid making them in the future. The top five include:

• Mixing tenses
• Misplacing apostrophes in plural or possessive words
• Missing words, often prepositions like “to” or “in”
• Dangling participles or modifiers. For example, in the sentence “Researching insurance marketing, the team developed a great idea,” the first part of the sentence is “dangling” because it is not associated with the subject that the author intended.
• Lacking proper subject-verb agreement

These types of errors may not be as glaring as misspellings, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t apparent to attentive readers. Keeping these things in the back of your mind can help ensure that the content you post to your company blog is engaging and easy to read. Nothing can drive people away from your insurance website like content that requires re-reading in order to understand it!

Every industry has its own language – the Internet Marketing world is no different. For those of us who work in the industry, it can be so easy to get swept up in the jargon that we forget not everyone uses these terms on a daily basis. At Astonish Results, we’re constantly communicating with clients who do not have backgrounds in Internet Marketing, so it’s important that we stay away from the lingo we’ve become accustomed to and speak in plain English.

My goal for this post is to translate some of the terms we throw around most often into basic English. Here we go…

Internet Marketing

The practice of marketing products or services over the internet. It is also referred to as online marketing, web marketing, or digital marketing. Internet marketing includes websites, email marketing, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and social media.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization – The practice of helping a website show up in the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Search engine optimization is an internet marketing strategy that analyzes web searches – from determining how the search engines are ranking websites in the search results to figuring out what people are searching for and what specific terms (or keywords) are being used.

SEM

Search Engine Marketing – also known as Paid Search – is the practice of increasing a website’s exposure through paid search tactics such as PPC (pay per click). In a very general overview, SEM involves paying to have a search result appear when a search is done for a certain keyword term. If someone clicks on your ad, you pay an agreed upon price. The goals are in line with those of an SEO strategy, but SEO involves organic results and SEM involves paid results.

Link Building

Link building is the practice of getting other websites to link to your site in order to boost rankings in the search engines. Having a relevant, quality website link to your site is like getting a vote. If the search engines see that other websites want to share your information and promote your website, then they are more likely to deem your site worthy of a higher search ranking.

Search Spiders

When we refer to search spiders, or web crawlers, we’re referring to the computer program that can browse the web to find search results. The search engines use search spiders to come up with a quick, up-to-date, organized list of what’s available on the web so the search engine can then determine how relevant the content is – this turns into the search results you see on Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

Unique Content

We all know about plagiarism and the negative consequences associated with it – providing unique content for your website and blog will keep you out of trouble. The search engines love fresh, honest, helpful content – doing so will make your site seem more useful. Every page on your website and every blog post should say something different. You cannot copy content from your website and post it on your blog – the search engines will recognize this as duplicate content and you could be punished. The best way to stay in the search engines’ good graces is to create unique content every time you write.

Search Volume

Search volume is the number of times a certain term is typed into the search engines on a monthly basis. When we decide which keywords should be used in your SEO strategy, we are comparing the search volume for hundreds of terms to determine which are the best fit. In addition to the search volume, we need to look at a term’s search competition before we decide to select it as one of your keywords.

Search Competition

A term’s search competition lets us know how many other sites are trying to be found for the term. If we find that a term has a search competition of 100% then we know it will be very difficult to rank for that keyword because a lot of other sites are also trying to rank for it. We want to find a term that has a high search volume and a low search competition when we are selecting your keywords.

There is much more internet jargon that we use on a daily basis, this was a peak at the topics we reference most often. What are some of the Internet Marketing terms you hear on a regular basis? Let us know if there are any terms you need clarification on and we can feature them in a future post!

In every case, posting the content online you write for your agency is never enough. Just because you make a blog post or a press release available on the internet doesn’t mean that everyone will access it. Let’s be honest, these posts are often tucked away on websites and in order to get the word out you need to do things like post them on your Facebook and Twitter accounts in the hope that your friends and followers will relay the message. However, sometimes even that isn’t enough so it becomes necessary to consult alternative methods to link sharing, one of these methods being social bookmarking. Bookmarking websites have been around for a while, but only recently have they begun gaining steam in the business community. While most people use these for news and finding unique articles, your company should be implementing them to grow traffic to your insurance agency website. But how is this done? How should your agency go about sharing content on social bookmarking sites? It’s easy!

Your best bet is start off with three of the most common bookmarking sites—Digg, Reddit, and Stumbleupon. These sites—especially Stumbleupon and Reddit—are commonly used for internet users to share links of news articles or anything interesting they find on the web. Websites are separated and shared via categories, so for instance topics such as “news,” “entertainment,” and “lifestyle” are commonly browsed tabs. What sets apart social bookmarking from social media is that social bookmarking allows you to reach an audience outside of your community on Facebook and Twitter. If done correctly, your links will hopefully show up in lists under whatever category you choose.

In order to bookmark a link, you’ll need to create a login for every site you want to bookmark with. For now, we’re going to use Reddit as an example because not only is it one of the most visited bookmarking sites, it’s the 45th most visited website in the U.S., according to Alexa.  After registering and creating a username and password, you’re ready to begin bookmarking! To start, jump to Reddit’s homepage where you will see medium-sized text reading “Submit a link” in the upper right hand corner. You’ll be brought to a page where the next step is to fill out information regarding the link you’re posting. Whether it’s a blog post, press release, or any other form of content, it’s important to make sure your title is creative and eye-popping while also including your keyword. If you’re having trouble coming up with a catchy title that includes the keyword, don’t worry; making the title stand out is the most important thing and in some cases it’s okay to omit the keyword. Once you come up with a title, all you need to do is copy and paste the link from your post and you’re site is bookmarked!

Once you start bookmarking your pages, make sure to keep posting them on your social media sites as well: the goal is to reach as many people as possible. Once you start bookmarking every piece of content you post online, you should start seeing better results and more hits to your website.

In addition to Reddit, Digg, and Stumbleupon, here are additional bookmarking sites to consider: Delicious, Jumptags, and, of course, Google.

Most users flock to the internet’s search engines for one thing: to find help.  Help in finding the answer to a question.  Help in solving a problem that they have. Help in purchasing the right car at their local dealership.

Being visible on a variety of keyword searches in Google is applicable and valuable for businesses in every industry.  The world’s largest companies use their websites as the best (and most accessible) source of information about their brand, products, or services. At the same time the world’s smallest companies have established a web presence as a vital lifeline to previously inaccessible markets.

In the end, search engines pull them all together: the smallest companies can compete right next to the largest.  Search engines are the great equalizer of digital marketing.

Or are they?

Not all markets are the same. The search “landscape” for certain industries are more competitive than others.  The big box electronics chains are fighting tooth and nail for top position on keywords like“blu ray dvd player” and “flat screen tv”.

The insurance industry, both personal and commercial products, is no different.  In fact, one leading industry blog just proclaimed the search landscape for insurance-related searches to be the most competitive amongst all PPC keywords. A study conducted on the average cost-per-click (CPC) across millions of keywords found that insurance-related terms were the most expensive, ahead of keyword groups such as “mortgage” and “loans”.

Does that mean that this search landscape is inaccessible and cost-inefficient for the smaller agencies in the industry?  I would offer an emphatic “NO”.  In fact, I believe just the opposite: the high competition in this particular realm indicates the sheer demand for insurance information that potential customers are looking for. Does that mean that smaller agencies should focus their PPC marketing dollars into bids for high-dollar keywords like “car insurance”?  No.  It simply means that these agencies need to have their paid search campaigns strategies modified to get the biggest “bang” for their marketing buck. There is room in this competitive space to be active…and profitable!  After all, if 80% of all insurance customers are beginning their search for their policy online, can you afford to ignore this marketing tactic?

Here are some strategies to be competitive in a competitive paid search marketplace:

With these simple steps, you are well on your way to becoming effective in a competitive advertising space.  Companies of any size can be active in this marketing medium, and capitalize on all of those people who are saying “HELP!” to their search engines.

Fear has a lot to do with the unknown. SEO is still a relatively new development in the marketing industry, so it stands to reason that many companies are hesitant to dig into it. I’ve outlined five of the top reasons companies fear search engine optimization in hope that eventually we can quell these fears. The more you learn about SEO, the less intimidating it will become and the easier it will be to implement a solid optimization strategy.

Fearing SEO or being intimidated by all of the work required of a successful strategy is no reason to steer clear of this proven marketing tactic. According to G.I. Joe, knowing is half the battle – so start your education today. If you can grasp the fundamentals of SEO, then you are one step ahead of the pack. If you don’t have the time to implement an SEO campaign on your own, team up with a consultant but be sure to stay away from the false “quick results” scams out there. Then prepare yourself for some hard work and eventually you’ll see some astonishing results!