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.

In the old days, small business owners had limited avenues in which to spread awareness for their companies. Whether it was radio or print advertising, the platforms available for getting a message across were few and far between. Needless to say, advertising has come a long way for local businesses. Before, only the big boys could afford mega advertising campaigns in national magazines, newspapers, and television. But now, with the internet leaving everything else in its wake, anyone can bring attention to their business for relatively little money. Currently, if you don’t have a website you’re considered to be behind. If you’re not taking advantage of Facebook and Twitter, you’re deemed old fashioned. Additionally, if your business isn’t putting its name up on Google Places or Yahoo! Local, you need to begin to soon! Local listings pages are an easy and inexpensive way to bring customers to your website. So what are local listings pages, anyway?

Local listings, or “local search,” are pages created on specialized search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against a database of local business listings. A local listings search will normally include the “what,” such as restaurant, hotel, etc., but also the “where,” such as city name, address, or postal code. For instance, if someone is looking for insurance in Warwick, R.I., they’d search terms like “insurance in Warwick” or “cheap insurance Warwick.” Your goal as an agency is to optimize your page so it shows up in search results for users in your region.

A standard local listings page will include three important components: location, business description, and customer reviews. The two most popular platforms, Google places and Yahoo! Local, provide a map in addition to your business address. It goes without saying, but it’s important to have your address exactly as you need it to appear. If you ever change locations, always remember to update your address and any other information such as phone and fax numbers.

Your business description can be as standard or creative as you want. A good rule of thumb is to always include your agency name as well as a few examples of services you provide. Keep it short, but always make sure it is longer than one sentence and at least two.

The customer reviews section can make or break a page. A listing with customer reviews will make your page look more legitimate because users will see that customers have come to you for help and have been influenced enough by your business to share their thoughts on the web. Also, the more reviews you have, the better traction you will receive.

Additional information you can include, depending on the platform, can be business hours, payment methods, keywords, and even a photo.

Remember, the days of print, radio, and local TV advertising are long gone. While you can still use these to advertise your agency, the internet, especially local search, is a platform you need to take advantage of.

Aside from Yahoo! And Google, feel free to check out these platforms as well:

Merchant Circle

City Search

Insider Pages

Yelp

As a Search Engine Marketer, one of the questions that I get asked most by clients is “What determines my position in Google search results?”

It is a popular point of confusion — clients have a separate SEO team establishing the importance of using keywords on their website in order to gain visibility in search results while their SEM team touts the ability to use marketing budgets to force Google to place their advertisement in search results on important keyword searches.  While SEO (search engine optimization) is a merit-based system of ranking, SEM (pay-per-click) is an auction-based system that allows advertisers to gain visibility based on keyword-specific bids.  Let me explain!

PPC results, as we all know, appear at the top and right side of Google search results.  There are ten available positions on each search result page (normally three at the top and seven on the side).  On the surface, Google uses a simple formula to determine how these results stack up against each other.

PPC ads are ranked using this formula:

Ad rank = keyword bid ($) x quality score

Keyword bid (or CPC bid) is the maximum dollar amount that you are willing to pay for each click on your ad for that specific keyword (“car insurance”, in this instance).  Quality score is a Google metric that determines how relevant and useful your ad is to the search engine user. The higher your quality score, the better. Google actually assigns a quality score for each keyword that you wish to advertise for (1-10 scale).

Quality score measures “relevancy” by looking at two things: your PPC advertisement and the page to which you are directing traffic after the click (the “landing page”).  Both must be directly related to the keyword on which you have placed a bid, or else Google will assign you a poor quality score.

For example, if your PPC campaign contains insurance related keywords Google will:

What happens if you have a poor quality score? Good question.  In most instances, this poor quality score will be reflected in a higher required cost per click or in a lower ad rank (if you do not compensate by increasing your keyword bid).  In other examples of ads that are not remotely relevant to their associated keywords, Google will simply not show the ad in search results in an effort to improve their user experience. Remember, Google’s ultimate goal is to provide the exact information that it believes its user is looking for.

Google will determine your specific click cost on a keyword-by-keyword basis, using the formula above. But remember this when wondering how your cost per click is calculated in Google: just because you have bid $4.00 per click for a particular keyword doesn’t mean that you will pay that much.  It is the maximum that you will pay for that keyword.  All things being equal, the advertiser will pay will pay the minimum amount for their ad’s position as possible.  If the quality score is the same for two advertisers competing for the same keyword, the high bidder will pay only $0.01 more per click than the next highest bidder and be placed one rank higher in search results.  Confused?  Don’t be.  Let’s look at an example:

Advertiser 1 has a maximum keyword bid of $10.00 for the term “boise auto insurance”, more than any other competitor. They have a quality score of 8/10. Advertiser 2 has a maximum keyword bid of $8.00 for the same keyword, with a quality score of 8/10.  They are the second highest bidder.  Advertiser 1 will be in position 1 in search results, with a cost per click of $8.01.

You won’t always pay a per-click cost equal to your maximum bid, which is pretty cool!  You can further improve your cost efficiency by doing things to raise your quality score, but that’s a different blog post for a different day.

There you have it – a quick explanation of how Google determines your position and cost in Paid Search results.

Social Media isn’t just for Twitter and Facebook anymore.  More people are utilizing Foursquare to let their friends and family know what they’re up to.  This application is a location-based check-in system allows customers to boost your business’s status in the community.

“Foursquare unlocks your city and makes your world a more interesting place,” writes Carmine Gallo, author of ‘The Power of Foursquare’.  He continues, “It informs, illuminates, and inspires.  For small businesses, it can help attract, reward and engage customers in ways that were never possible.”  Gallo’s book give seven tips that educate business owners how the application can help them.

• Connect your brand
• Harness new fans
• Engage your followers
• Create rewards
• Knock out the competition
• Incentivize your customers
• Never stop entertaining

With the November 15, 2011 revamp of Foursquare.com, your business has the opportunity to get noticed without a customer “check in”.  Users who sign onto Foursquare via the web at certain times the website will suggest places they should visit.  For instance, sign in at 11:30am and they will suggest great lunch spots near their office.  The same will occur later in the day around dinnertime.   Foursquare is committed to helping your business connect with your customers.

Compatible with other Social Media tools, when your customers “check-in” they are able to notify not only their friends who utilize Foursquare, but Facebook and Twitter.  For every check-in, Foursquare users have the ability to “unlock” different achievements:

• Mayorships
• Reward points
• BadgesDeals

Foursquare helps your business connect with your customers in a new way.  It also brings attention to your business and community.  “Unlock” the possibilities.

One of the great things about a pay-per-click campaign in Google is the ability to access a myriad of data points to judge the effectiveness of your strategy.  The idea is to use all of the data available at your fingertips to make small changes to your campaign so that you can achieve two simple goals:

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?  It is – until you get a look of all the data that gets generated from a paid search campaign.  By the time most advertisers finish looking at their CPC (cost per click), CTR (click through rate), Cost per conversion, conversion rate, etc, their head begins to spin.

With so much information, it’s important to decide which is important enough to act on. My rule of thumb when it comes to deciphering this information is simple: your most important data is closest to your bottom-line business goals.  Why worry about CPC, when cost per lead is closer to the actual sale?  Why worry about the percentage of people who click on your ad (click through rate), when you can focus on the percentage of clicks that turned into a “conversion” (conversion rate)?

When I am working with one of our agency partners on their insurance marketing SEM, and need to do a “quick and dirty” assessment of their campaign’s performance, I have some go-to metrics that I look at first. Let’s take a look at three of them:

• How much have I spend already on this campaign?
• When is my budget projected to run out, based on campaign spending so far?
• What campaigns are spending the most?

After you get a handle on how much you’ve spent, you can get started on looking at metrics that show how your money is performing.  And the first thing I look at is…

One caveat:  as I mentioned in the beginning of this post, the most valuable metrics get as close to the “sale” as possible, so the ultimate indicator of performance is cost per sale (or cost per customer).  If you can directly attribute online sales to your SEM campaign, use a cost per sale as your substitute for CPO — this metric will tell you if your generated revenue is more than your investment in paid search.

• Is my website (more specifically your SEM landing page) effective at driving business?
• What keywords are most successful at driving conversions, and which keywords are just costing me money with very little return?

Your campaign’s conversion rate is a good indicator of how your landing page is performing.  If the page to which you are driving traffic is built with your conversion point in mind (a quote request form, for example), your conversion rate will benefit.  Since you’ve paid for the visitor’s click, you might as well pay attention to their behavior after they have cost you money. Your conversion rate will tell you if you are successful at converting costly visits into conversions.

Your campaign is capable of tracking conversion rate at the keyword level, which is a GREAT metric to be more efficient with your costs.  Does a particular keyword have a high conversion rate?  React to that by pushing up your bid and making that profitable keyword more visible.  Is there a certain set of terms that are costing you money but not producing conversions?  Pause or de-emphasize that term.

Use these metrics as a starting point in evaluating paid search marketing campaigns.  They’ll help you sort through all of the data that you can find in Adwords (or the SEM report that your marketing partner sends to you!), and get to the information that really matters.

If you get lost in all that data just remember to ask yourself one very important question: which data most directly impacts my bottom line?

Here it is — the last installment of my series on driving qualified visitors through your paid search (SEM) campaign.  In part one of this series, I discussed PPC keyword selection as the first two steps in qualifying traffic, and in part two I showed you how to optimize your ad copy in order to drive traffic from the visitors that you’d most prefer.

Remember that qualifying your paid search traffic has two parts:

Also remember that, as compared to organic search traffic (where you welcome visitors in all phases of the sales funnel), the most effective and efficient SEM campaigns can focus on driving visits that produce conversions.  Let your organic search optimization efforts drive the “information-gathering” traffic, use your PPC campaign to target the “purchasing” consumer.

Now that we’ve covered three steps to improve your campaign, let’s dive into the next tactic that will help you drive valuable clicks:

Step 4: Create Landing Pages to Promote Your Conversion Point

You’ve set up your PPC keywords, you’ve created some unbelievably enticing ad copy to get your audience to click … now what? The process of converting your traffic from visitors into customers is technically over, as you’ve now received a visitor from your SEM campaign.  But the most effective PPC campaigns do not stop optimization until after the most important part of this process – the conversion point.  If I am running a campaign to sell a widget, and I’ve received my captive audience through paid search, I want to make darn sure that I make the final piece of their purchasing process is both obvious and easy.

Once I’ve paid for this click, the last thing that I want the visitor to do is get distracted, bored, confused or frustrated. I want to subtly but firmly guide them through the conversion (or transactional) process.  That’s why the landing page in a paid search campaign is so important.  I’ll give you three quick tips to create an effective landing page, all geared towards promoting a conversion point.

Note that the page is simple, does not contain too much text, and provides no linking away from this page.  The visitor, who has arrived on a very specific keyword search (including the word “quote”) is confronted with exactly the type of information that they have requested, and are more likely to convert as a result!

There you have it – four easy steps to generating and converting qualified paid search traffic! Apply these tactics to your campaign and you just might get a more efficient use of your marketing dollars.

If you ever had the thought that you cannot blog, trust me, it’s not true. In my own experiences, I have found out that anyone can be a successful blogger to contribute to your agency’s insurance marketing efforts.

When I was first approached with the idea of blogging, I was a little skeptical to say the least. I didn’t think I would have the right writing style for it, and I honestly didn’t think that I would enjoy it. I soon found out that I couldn’t have been further from the truth.

I am very analytical. In middle and high school, I was on the math team. No joke, there were weekly meetings, even competitions. So how is someone so number-centric able to write, and do it well? I’ll tell you!
Have the Right Attitude
Your attitude toward something is almost always a deciding factor in your success. If you come into something with the idea that you will fail, you have no doubt already sealed your fate.

Always step into new experiences with a positive attitude. Know that there aren’t any downsides to trying something new. At best, you have discovered a skill you never knew you had. At worst, you gave something a good, honest try. You will also learn something in the process. If those are the only outcomes, there is no reason to not try writing a blog post or two!
Pick a Good Topic
Once you have a positive attitude, it is time to pick a topic to write about! This is probably a longer and more frustrating process than the writing itself, honestly. After all, when you are researching, there’s a whole internet of possible topics! How on earth are you expected to pick just one?

When you are searching for a potential blog topic, try not to get too bogged down with ideas. Keep it simple, and keep the following in mind:

Pick a topic that is relevant and interesting to your audience. Ask yourself this: what are people coming to your blog to read about? Make sure your topic answers this question.

Pick a topic you like. If you don’t like the topic you write about, no one will enjoy reading it. Picture for a moment being a high school English teacher. It would take all the patience in the world to get through a stack of thrown-together and last minute essays on Friedrich Nietzsche and nihilism written by 16 year olds. Can you even imagine the torture?

This is something that you must avoid putting your readers through at all costs. If you write about something you like and are passionate about, you don’t run the risk of your reader’s eyes glazing over.

To really avoid putting your readers to sleep, make sure to read your blog over after it is written. Make sure that you can read it fluidly, and fix any awkward wordings that are hard to avoid when writing. This is a very important step in writing, because sometimes what sounds good in your head when you write needs a better logical flow once is it actually on paper.
Show It Off!
After you have written and revised, take pride in what you have done! You are now a blogger! Show your new creation to friends and co-workers. Nothing will motivate you to cultivate a new skill like praise.

Then it is finally time to post your work! Putting your writing on the internet may seem strange or scary at first, but be assured that it will become old hat after a while.

And remember, with a plan of action, a positive attitude, and some practice, anyone can be a blogger!

Keeping up with the latest local search optimization tactics in addition to maintaining your overall insurance agency marketing focus can be a formidable, but worthwhile task. Changes to the Google algorithm can occur without warning and effect how local search results are shown; there has never been a better but more difficult time to rank for high volume, local keywords.

Over the past 12 months, there have been changes in Google Places with tags, check-ins, deals and other extraneous but relevant information pulled into your Places listing. More information than ever was used to determine rankings for local search. Even third party citation sites like Yelp, Insider Pages and CitySearch were all pulled into a Google Places listing and given weight in rankings.
As of late, it has been suspected that Google has placed less emphasis on the third party review sites with the appearance of the RED “write a review” button on listings. Also, Google displaying reviews from Google users exclusively and placing links to the third party sites under the listing.
Your first thought might be to only go after the Google listings. But rather than putting all of your eggs in the “Google Reviews only” basket, a more robust and natural approach would involve a review strategy that is more diverse and includes several different local citation sites.

That all sounds great, but how will you execute this new plan?

Encourage your customers to leave reviews for your business on their preferred site. Google may be a place that many people start their search but it won’t be the only place users will go to find information out about a business. Give your customers a nudge. Incorporate review buttons in a conspicuous location on your site to direct traffic to review sites directly from your site.

Point Your Customers in the Right Direction.

Develop a one-sheet to hand to customers or e-mailed along with your products or services confirmation e-mails. Asking for the review in the sales process will help it to become part of the culture of your agency. Utilize your e-mail list and send out a review e-mail with a link to a handful of prominent review sites to make giving your agency a review as easy and painless as possible.

DISCLAIMER: Make sure your service warrants a good review. By telling your customers to give your products or services a review, you become vulnerable for bad reviews. First and foremost, make sure that you are giving your customers the best customer service you possibly can. Typically, when you make a conscious effort to provide excellent customer service, obtaining five star reviews can become less of a chore.

People want their opinion to be heard, so when your company provides an above average customer experience, point them in the direction a review of your site. Remember also that below average or poor experiences can lead to a poor review of your business. That’s ok. Take a moment to respond to the review and offer a solution to the problem. People will see that you are actively monitoring your reviews and you have taken the time to remedy the situation and do right by your customer. Consider this…

Are Your Reviews Honest?

When you see a business with 50 reviews with five stars do you become a little suspicious? Maybe they really earned all of those five star reviews but most likely some of those reviews were not genuine. Instead of trying to get as many “perfect” reviews as you possibly can, monitor your reviews and deal with the good and bad reviews as they roll in. Thank someone for a good review and address the concerns of a bad review. Being a proactive business owner will say more about your business than 50 five star reviews can. You can also learn where you may need to improve as a business.

GET MORE LOCAL REVIEWS FOR YOUR BUSINESS TODAY!

Try this, each month select a winner from your reviews and try to get in touch with that person. Alert people to the drawing and highlight the winner on your on-site blog and social media sites. When people see that you actively monitor your local reviews and actually select a winner every month for a prize, people will be more likely to 1. Leave a review because there is something in it for them, and 2. Interact with your business on social media and blog pages. This is a great way to get people interacting with your business on a continuous basis.

Keep in mind that customers that leave positive reviews are much more likely tell people about your business. People who refer their friends and family to your business are also more likely to write a review for your business on a local review site. Connecting with the local user is the end goal and finding new and innovative ways to make that connection that will be beneficial to your business now and in the future.

As social media has expanded over the past couple of years, it is obvious the affect it has had on our society.  We have now become more fast paced and invested in understanding the true definition of communication.  According to the Harvard Business Review, the future of social media stands right in front of us.

From Washington, with Obama utilizing Twitter for his campaign, to millions of Facebook users all around the world, it is clear that social media as something spontaneous reflecting how we behave in the real world is coming to an end.  We are entering an age of social business, bringing about a purposeful, planned, orchestrated, and integrated way of doing business in a social context.  This strategy allows one to complexly make a message feel personal to the outside, while on the inside, the organization is planning and navigating every move.  As further evidence to the shift, one can look to technology.

Over the past several years, innovative companies who have geared their mindset towards the future have begun to understand the value of monitoring conversations.  Therefore, they have purchased software licenses from platforms such as Radian 6.  Additionally, the notion of listening to social conversations is only a small portion of understanding social business.  The true opportunity lies in scaling and operationalizing “social”.  Thus, if the next phase of social media is operating as a scalable social business, then expect to see an increase of activity in the following:

Organizational Design: Social media is focused on parts of an organization or business where communications and marketing encourage social media tactics, while a social business is redesigned to look through a lens that is more holistic for the organization.  For further proof, we can look to Facebook, where business and brand pages deal with both customer “likes” and complaints.  Corporate Facebook pages are great examples of the need for marketing, PR, customer service, and HR to all figure out how to work together.  This is because users on Facebook don’t make the distinction behind which department is running what and to them, a company page represents all departments.

Social Business Intelligence: The rise of social media has led to many technology solutions, allowing organizations to become involved on conversations happening across multiple digital public spaces.  Organizations that have become accustomed to listening in on conversations are now positioned to take the next step and convert listening into organization-wide business intelligence.  Socially intelligent organizations will be able to adapt to conditions in their environment and eventually predict and plan for future scenarios.

Cultures of Collaboration, Co-Creation & Shared Value: The most significant recent business case, which illustrates the business side of social, comes from creating an ecosystem.  This idea operates by having value enter into it and then extracted by multiple stakeholders for mutual gain.  An ecosystem, by definition, is sustainable.

The relationship between social media and social business is complicated.  On one hand, the public desires authentic interactions in social spheres from real people and expect a real-time response.  On the other hand, a business or organization requires a system to be in place that coordinates activities.  Therefore, the oncoming shift is moving from a focus on external media consumption to the internal business integration of what it means to become social and connected. Is social media something you have included in your insurance agency marketing plan? If not you should make sure to include it, social media really is becoming the number one way to communicate with your audience.

It’s no secret the influence social media has had on Americans especially those in younger generations. What once started out as an application for people to meet and interact online has now become a super highway of sharing personal and public information. With this data, businesses and search engines are able to follow trends and tendencies among users and see what types of topics and products are popular and, more importantly, unpopular.

In recent years social media use has exploded at exponential and alarming rates. Now, not only do younger people use these platforms, but adults do as well. While Facebook and Twitter have over 700 and 200 million users respectively, it’s impossible to deny the influence they have had on society and culture. It’s especially been helpful for businesses. When information about the product is supplied and repeated, more traffic is brought to the company. With Google’s new social media platform Google Plus gaining in popularity, businesses are obviously at a disadvantage if they are not spreading their brand via social media.

Although most users access their social media accounts on computers, a new trend is beginning to emerge in how consumers gather and spread information: Smartphones. Ever since the release of Apple’s iPhone in 2007, mobile companies have been churning out phones with World Wide Web capabilities at rates that seemed impossible five years ago. Smartphones are so popular that, according to a recent study, of the people that own cell phones, 42% have a Smartphone. That’s closing in on 50%, and it’s only going to increase. Eventually, the inevitability of technology will cause every phone to be a smartphone.

So what does this mean for social media marketing? How does the increasing usage of Smartphones affect your agency and the way we use social media?

Because so many Americans have smart phones, information is being gathered and shared at the highest rate the world has seen. Social media marketing, and marketing in general, is in over its head with the ability consumers now have to see everything that is going on in the world wherever they may be. Consumers use Smartphones for surfing the internet as well as accessing their social media accounts. Individuals are notified of any happenings and updates on social networking sites through their cell phones in real-time. The consistent connection to social sites means agencies can remind and update followers about their capabilities, offerings, importance and much more. Additionally, advertisements are always in view of the user as well. Simply put, your agency has the opportunity to be sending messages and information to your followers wherever they are at all times, so why not take advantage?

Smartphones are overwhelmingly changing the landscape of business and marketing. Because information is now available anywhere, it’s up to you and your agency to implement a social media strategy that will provide constant updates for your followers with smartphone access.

With social networking applications teaming with Smartphones, spreading your brand has never been easier.