Utilizing social media can be instrumental in increasing your company’s exposure, but you must utilize social media strategically! The first step to a successful social media strategy starts with community building. Community building ensures not only that you have a significant fan and follower base, but that the individuals you’re connecting with are the right fit for your business. The use of social media is meant to be an interactive initiative, so it’s important to interact with the correct users in order to maximize your results.  There are certain ways to successfully build a strong community that will contribute to the success of your business.

Community building, like anything else, starts first with identifying your objectives.

• What are you trying to achieve from this and what goals are you going to set?

This leads into phase two of community building: you must know your audience. This is a crucial component in achieving success. You have to know who you are communicating with. Do the research!  The more local your content is, the more relevant it will be to your specific community. Understand the likes and dislikes of your fans and followers, but also give them a place to voice their opinions. Just as you want to be relevant in the real world, you need to be relevant in the digital world! Your friends, fans and followers will become more than just social media users in the end!

Once you’ve established who your audience is, it’s important to retain the members of your community. How can you do that? Be creative!

• Use “call to action posts;” give your fans and followers a reason to comment.
• Use tasteful humor and enlighten people with unique information.
• Most importantly, be reputable. Once it’s out there, it’s out there! Be well aware of what you’re posting and where you are receiving your information from!

Once your community is built to the best of your ability, you can’t just stop there. In order to take it to the next level, you need to further your interaction. The best communities are those that merge their social and real world relationships together! Allow your users to put a face to a name, humanize your page by stepping out from behind the computer. Attend local events, participate in things happening in the community and interact with fans and followers on a personal level.

Community building is essential for optimizing your presence in social media. Identify your goals, do the proper research to understand your audience, get creative, and finally, get involved!

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!

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 Malcolm Gladwell’s renowned national best-seller, The Tipping Point, the author describes countless examples in which small, seemingly insignificant occurrences in the world caused dramatic change. In the most famous example, he describes how New York City reduced its crime rate suddenly and significantly beginning in the early 90s. How did this happen? By focusing entirely on small, seemingly insignificant things. The city began strictly enforcing laws against petty crimes like subway fare-dodging and public drinking. Graffiti and litter removal city-wide was made a top priority. The city did not suddenly hire thousands more policemen nor make any significant changes to policing methods. Yet, a 2001 study proved that those “small” changes they did make caused a dramatic, immediate, and sustained drop in both petty and felony crimes. Today, the FBI reports that New York City is the safest large city in America, by a long-shot.

The story of New York City’s sudden, drastic reduction in crime serves as an important real-world example of how making small changes can produce a huge difference. Consider the “Request for Insurance Quote”  form on your company’s web site. To many, the design of this element is an afterthought. The logic goes, if a potential customer wants a quote, they will fill it out and if not, they won’t. Not so. A web visitor who wants a quote still must be convinced that filling out your form is worth their time, and that their information will be treated respectfully. Does your form look professionally designed? Does it give a positive first impression?

Try this: Show your Request a Quote page to a few folks who have no vested interest in you or your company and ask them for their candid first impression. Their opinions very likely reflect those of every other visitor to your site. If the reaction is not positive, it’s time for a redesign.

This same concept applies to many other elements of your online marketing campaign. Take your Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising on Google, for example. A title and two lines of 35 characters each is all you are given to convince the user to click on your ad – that is half as long as this sentence. It’s shorter than an elevator pitch, so you had better make it count. The right ad copy is the difference between very little traffic and noticeable traffic. It is the difference between a high conversion rate and a complete waste of money. Our team at Astonish Results has over 10 years of experience writing ad copy for PPC campaigns and the results truly deliver.

Does your staff answer the phone with a friendly, upbeat tone? If not, you could be losing customers. It has been proven time and time again that people buy from those they like – even if you do not have the best price. If your front-line people answering the phone sound miserable or give the impression that the caller is bothering them, you have already put a huge dent in your firm’s likeability and the customer has not even spoken to you yet. It is absolutely critical that potential customers get a positive first impression, and it starts with the initial phone call to your firm. It costs nothing to answer calls in a friendly, upbeat voice and yet it can set the tone for entire conversation.

Sure, you’ve heard a real-world example of how sweating the small stuff can make a difference in big-city crime reduction, but what about a real-world business example? Look no further than America’s most valuable company, Apple. The maker of the most popular MP3 player, smartphone, and tablet computer got to their position by worrying tirelessly about tiny seemingly-inconsequential details that their competition completely overlooked. By concentrating not only on the product itself, but things as rudimentary as the product packaging, Apple developed a reputation for not just cool products, but high-quality products. Apple not only sells the most of their latest gadget, but they charge the most, too. The perceived value they have created by focusing on the finest details makes this possible. The same concept can be applied to your insurance agency. By focusing on the little things that your competition ignores, you will not only have an edge in landing new customers, but you will realize benefits in reduced churn, higher margins, and a healthier bottom line.

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!

By now, it’s safe to say that we all are aware of how crucial blogging is to one’s overall Internet Marketing strategy. Whether you publish content weekly, 3 times per week or even daily it’s likely that the time will come when you are struck with writers block. It’s not easy to create content that not only naturally incorporates your keywords but is also readable, entertaining and something your readers will want to share.

When you’re struggling for ideas, where do you turn? Perhaps you scour the office for industry-related updates or maybe you check your favorite news station’s website; whatever you do to dig up some blog-worthy ideas can easily be combined with these tips for creative content creation:

Behind-the-Scenes Insight

Your blog serves many purposes including the need to: to increase your overall SEO efforts, thus increasing traffic and generating leads – as well as highlighting your agency’s culture. The goal with any good Insurance Marketing strategy is to capture the attention of prospects, retain current clients and inevitably grow our business. To do so you have to position yourself at the forefront of your consumer’s mind; and how do you do that – by separating yourself from the competition.

When you think of insurance, what comes to mind? Most often you’ll envision accident scenarios, policies and claims. But there’s so much more to what you do and who you are, so showcase that on your blog. Do you celebrate employee birthdays with a giant cake? Maybe you volunteer with a local charity. Perhaps you have launched a friendly office-wide competition…take Astonish Results for example and our office’s RFM Weight Loss Challenge! By providing current clients and prospects with a sneak-peak into what life is like at your agency you are allowing them the opportunity to connect with you on a different level and build a relationship that goes beyond simply selling them an insurance policy.

Appeal to the Season

Changes in season are the perfect starting point for an informative, yet appealing blog post. You can coordinate your blogging efforts with the ever-changing weather patterns; think about including information about recent storms, local damages and how to best prepare for severe weather.

Seasonal posts can stretch farther than what may be falling from the sky. Think beyond weather and consider the activities that your consumers may participate in during any given period of time. Perhaps in the winter you talk about preparing your vehicle for the colder weather or in the summer you highlight the watercraft insurance policies your agency can offer its avid boaters. Nearly everything has its own season; weddings, back-to-school, holiday prep, etc. focus on providing useful, valuable information that can apply to your consumers’ everyday lives.

Tips & How-To’s

One of the most popular and well-received blogging styles is those that include tips and “how-to” information. Alongside your mission to gain a competitive edge, increase your agency’s visibility and strengthen your SEO, your blogging should also serve a greater purpose—providing value to the reader. You should strive to craft content that can positively impact your current and prospective clients, give them the facts, advice and general knowledge they both want and need.

These types of blogs can include general insurance tips, such as how to keep particular premiums low or can span across a variety of topics such as how to protect your home from burglars or fires safety tips for one’s home and office.

Current Events

Another aspect of your blogging strategy is using your content to brand your agency as a credible, knowledgeable expert – and better yet an active community leader. To do so you need to know what’s going on in the world around you and how it both applies to and affects the lives of your consumers. Developing a reputation for your agency which portrays you as a trusted resource for valuable information and news can help you both draw in readers (and prospects!) as well as keep them coming back for more.
When blogging about current events, make sure that they are either applicable to the industry or specific to your local community. Look for changes in legislation, new acts or regulations or even choose to stay up-to-date on the constantly evolving issues with health care. Perhaps a new driving-while-texting ban was passed in your state; that would serve as a quality blog post as well as provide you with the opportunity to incorporate some auto insurance information within the content. Or maybe flood damages reached a record high in your region, explain what this might mean for area homeowners and their insurance premiums.

Whatever you choose to write about, make sure your blogs are always valuable, interesting and portray your agency as a leading insurance resource. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box—do what you can to make your insurance content appealing and share-worthy.

Have any suggestions? Where do you go when your content has you stumped? Share your suggestions and comments with us below and feel free to check out our additional blogging tips for making the process more enjoyable!

In my last post, I discussed a few ways to go ahead and start improving your SEO strategy. Or, to jump-start it for those that have not yet begun to rethink their insurance marketing strategy. This time, I will discuss a few different ways you can make the most out of all of the search technology existing today.

It is important to not overuse keywords to the extent that your page becomes a mass of search terms with only a few phrases and terms that joining them together. To improve your site’s search engine optimization, it is important to limit yourself to just a few very effective key words per page.

Keep in mind, the goal is to not bombard the search engines with an assortment of keywords that may not pertain to the messages of your website. In other words, it is important to make sure each page has a different focus, and be optimized accordingly. If you are operating a sports memorabilia store, optimize for “baseball jerseys” in the jersey’s page, “golf clubs and tees” on the sporting equipment page, etc. Don’t overcomplicate the search engine and try to fool it. In the long run, it will only demote your page search ranking.

What is a Meta Tag?

You may or may not have heard about these. To put meta tag’s in Layman’s terms, they are just invisible text incorporated into a website which describes the contents of the page along with listing relevant keywords. Meta tags are read by “spiders,” which are software applications that search the web and rank pages for search. Well before the days of Google, meta tags used to be a valuable tool in SEO, but now they are no longer as relevant. It cannot hurt to continue to utilize them, but they will not improve your search ranking or drive traffic to your website.

After you have done your research and developed a good keyword and link strategy, you can take advantage of search engine technology by doing the following:

• Keep content fresh. Interestingly enough, search engine spiders will follow websites that are most frequently updated. If you don’t update your content on a consistent basis, then your website will be demoted lower in the rankings. To keep your website up to the top of the rankings, it is recommended that you blog every single day.
• Remove pages. If you find that certain pages on your site are not generating enough interest, then why should you bother to keep them? Uninteresting or out of date pages can only hurt your search ranking. Always substitute quantity of links for quality of links in any situation. This is just another way to keep your site’s content fresh and up in search rankings.

Most companies that run their own blog do will typically manage its content on WordPress or Drupal. Many bloggers prefer WordPress over most content management systems because it is the most user-friendly, and it “thinks like a writer.”  Most important, it is free to use and its interface is highly customizable.

The biggest step any business can take to improve its marketing strategy is to finally start taking the power of SEO and social media seriously. The tools available within these platforms are designed to help your business stand out from the pack and set it up for future success. These tips should help you begin the foundation of your SEO marketing strategy. However, it is still on your shoulders to implement these ground-breaking ideas.

In my first article of many, I will be discussing different ways a business can successfully integrate SEO strategies into their marketing campaign. When jump-starting your business’ marketing campaign, it is important to make sure that your company utilizes effective SEO tactics in order to generate a steady flow of traffic to your site. In the end, this will obviously increase your sales opportunities and your business will gain more attention within the community.

Since keywords are the foundation of any successful SEO strategy, you need to determine exactly what words or phrases are leading potential customers towards your site. If your business sells golf clubs and equipment, do the searches of “9-Irons” or “Callaway” benefit your site at all? Additionally, your business should take advantage of all the ground-breaking analytical search tools that Google has unleashed in this decade.

Use Long-Tail Terms

By utilizing long-tail terms that are more specific to your business, this should do wonders for your SEO. If you search for “batik shower curtains,” the top result is the site for Saffron Marigold, which is an online retailer of hand-printed linens from India. Searches on various products account for some 60 percent of the company’s business, according to Sandip Sarwate, co-founder of the company. He says that it would be extremely difficult for their products site to rank with a more general term, such as ‘shower curtains’. Since term is not specific enough for that particular product, the search results are greatly affected.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics tool is one of the best free products available in the market today. This innovative tool helps track your site’s SEO progress, keyword metrics, page views, number of total visitors, and the amount of time a visitor was actively logged into a particular webpage. Google Analytics contains reports that can answer questions about which of your sites are driving the most views. For example, a high bounce rate indicates that a particular page may need to be redesigned because for whichever reason, your visitors are not responding well to the content or the layout of the page.

Google Keyword Tool

Google’s Keyword Tool is a new tool which specializes in helping you come up with specific terms that all of your potential customers are searching for today. There are several online tools that do this, but Google’s Keyword Tool is the most user-friendly of them all. By simply entering the word “baseball”, the tool comes up with hundreds of various pages relating to this subject including “baseball history”, “baseball scores”, and “baseball teams”. This is just one quick way for you to get an idea of the logic of Google’s search engine.

The key thing to remember here is that your main goal is to make your site more appealing to your visitors. Although utilizing effective keywords is the primary objective in any SEO strategy, it is important to not get too caught up in your usage of keywords. You do not want your page to become clogged with search terms that are strung together with other various keywords that do not relate to your site. In all cases, the most effective way to build your SEO strategy is to limit your page to a few very effective keywords. Keep in mind that each page has a different focus and goal, and should be optimized appropriately. In a nutshell, these are a few ways to go ahead and start improving your SEO strategy, or to even jump-start it. Next time, I will discuss ways you can make the most out of search technology!

In my last post, I began to tackle the idea of “qualifying” leads and visits that come to your site through paid search advertising. After all, if we can help it, we’d rather pay for only those clicks that are coming to your site by completing the action that we desire: purchase, sign up, download, or upload, just to name a few conversion points that online marketers target.  Remember that qualifying traffic has two parts:

If you can optimize your paid search campaign to achieve these things, or at least get better at them, you are well on your way to using your marketing dollars efficiently.

There are several ways to do this tactically. Part 1 of this topic talked about the importance of targeting value-based keywords as well as utilizing “negative” keywords to eliminate traffic from visitors who have very little chance to convert.

This blog post investigates the next step to qualifying search traffic: ad copy optimization.

Step 3: Use Ad Copy to Tell Potential Visitors EXACTLY What You Want Them to DO

Your text-based ad that appears in Google’s paid search results is the last thing that visitors see before clicking through to your site, and thus, incurring you a potentially expensive cost per click. So why not make sure that those users know exactly what they are about to see or do before they add to your Google bill? You can do just that by using language in your ads that talks about exactly what the user will find on the other side of the click.  Let’s continue with an example from our friends in the insurance industry who are trying to get visitors to request a quote for their personal insurance. Can you spot the difference between these two pieces of ad copy?

Ad copy #1

California Auto Insurance

Questions about car insurance in CA?

Click here for more info!

CA-auto-insurers.com

Ad copy #2

Auto Insurance Quotes

Get your free car insurance quote

from Acme Insurance today!

Acme-insurance.com

The first ad entices users to click through to a page that is offering broad, generalized insurance information. This could include answers to the questions “what is auto insurance?”, “where can I find a list of California insurance companies?”, and “where can I get some general insurance questions answered?”.  This ad doesn’t speak at all to the conversion point, and instead will attract many visits from people looking to satisfy general insurance informational search queries.  This will lead to clicks (and cost) from visits that will have a much lower conversion ratio (conversions/clicks).  Many of these people will find what they are looking for (or worse, maybe not!), and immediately exit the site with their search intent satisfied.

The second ad speaks much more directly to a subset of potential visitors who are looking to do a particular thing with their insurance search: get an insurance quote.  The headline (top line) and description lines speak directly to this point, leaving little to the imagination in the way of what lies on the other side of their click.  This will accomplish the two goals that we’ve discussed when trying to qualify traffic:

Research has shown that the better you can match your ad copy to the actual search that the user performs, the better chance you have in acquiring that user.  This is reflected in click-through-rate (CTR), which measures the number of clicks as a percentage of those who are exposed to the ad. If the ad appeals to the searcher, they will click on it.  If we can match our ad to their actual search query, we’re more likely to get the click, and if we target our ad and keywords to specifically target an insurance quote, we’re more likely to get the conversion.

That, folks, is the definition of a qualified visitor!

Stay tuned to this blog for our next step in driving qualifying our traffic: paid search-specific landing page optimization.

When you are creating content, whether you are writing a blog post, creating an article or filling the pages of your website, your focus should always be towards the overall user experience. Amazing content has a personable voice that readers can identify with and is not written for the sole purpose of SEO. Sites filled with great, readable content will encourage people to read multiple posts and poke around the site. Your goal with great content creation should be to create a sticky site. A sticky site means that people stay on the site, read posts, interact with the content and don’t bounce right out.
More personable content will be more likely to attract interaction from visitors in the form of comments on your blog, tweets, shares and social bookmarks like Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious. The more your readers interact with your content, the more it will help to promote your site. The difference between writing content for search engines and writing content your readers can be very small and the best SEO writers are able to work keywords in seamlessly and still have an engaging piece.
If you believe that you are writing too much content for search engines, try linking to your company or product every two or three posts, not every time. You may see this as a wasted post but if you gain more readership and traffic out the post, the search engines will find your site regardless. Search engines love new content and when a spider discovers that you write great, fresh content that people are sharing, commenting on and tweeting, it will definitely come back to visit again. To keep your content ideas fresh, employ tactics that will bring new information directly to you in an organized and timely manner. Much of the time spent on writing and developing content can be spent doing research and thinking up with topics.
Once a spider has visited your site, you are included in the Google index. If a spider returns a week later and your site hasn’t changed, they may not return so quickly the next time. If the information on your site doesn’t change very often, writing a blog is a great way to keep your site updated with new content. Writing great content can help your site get indexed faster because it could warrant links, shares, and tweets. The fastest way to get your site indexed is to get an inbound link on another site that is regularly indexed by Google.

Some of the best ways to create engaging content are:

How-to articles- A how to article is great because many times people search for how to do something using search engines. So your exact match keyword term can naturally work its way into the title of your article or blog post.
Reviews- You can review articles, restaurants, books…pretty much anything. An honest review is a great way to obtain a link from the subject of your review. If you review an article, contact the author and let them know about your review, they might send a link from their site to your review.
Lists- Top ten lists, 3 ways to improve ______, The five best (fill in the blank) in New York; the possibilities are endless and are also a great way to get mentions on social media and inbound links to your site from the subjects on your list.
Guides- The Newcomer’s SEO Guide, My Guide to New York’s Best Diners, Where to visit in Florence, Italy. Guides are great because you can turn them into individual pages on your site. Guides are great sources of link bait and serve a practical use for someone looking for information on a specific topic.
These content ideas will give you a way to create posts and website copy that is easily accessible and can be read quickly. Build your following around your content and writing style and the search engines and rankings will come.