With YouTube!, Facebook and Twitter experiences (among many others) directly at our fingertips at any moment, we are constantly seeking new information/visual stimulation. Instead of buying print space now however many businesses are realizing the power of becoming their own miniature media outlets. By publishing relevant content that keeps your users engaged near-daily presents your brand to them in the most unobtrusive means possible. In short, just wow at this last decade in technology, the internet and communications – businesses literally have success in their own hands now (and we can track traffic/response ourselves, too).

To celebrate this new year we contracted Jessica Goldsmith, a recent marketing graduate from U.C.S.D. (who incidentally found us on the web) to interview five businesses that illustrate our overall excitement about how the internet totally stokes business growth. From a real-time, online insurance quoting engine to vegan, gorgeously-scented dry shampoo please read on to see how the internet presents very accessible opportunities for all business-types to grow:

As we move into 2012, it’s astounding to see the difference between now and what the Internet could do for businesses just a decade ago. These days, successful businesses grasp that harnessing Internet tools is imperative if they want to market their products more effectively, conduct more of their operations independently and reach new customers. We spoke to CEOs and founders of local businesses to find out about their favorite Internet tools and how they’ve used social media to promote their products.

I interviewed several businesses and a non-profit organization about how they use the Internet to increase sales and draw attention to their services, including: HairFix.com, ServiceContractors.com, A Reason to Survive (non-profit) and Cathedral.

The first person I interviewed was Gina Grega, founder of HairFix.com and maker of vegan, organic dry shampoos. Hair Fix is nearly 100% online so the website is “absolutely vital” to Gina’s business. Gina uses tools like Vertical Response to create e-newsletter campaigns and send out special offers. She says she uses social media site, Facebook “to create community and offer special ‘Facebook-only’ coupon codes and offers.’”

Gina’s HairFix.com is an Internet success story about how a customer-base can be grown online without having a storefront. She says word-of-mouth referrals, both on and offline, bring in the most business. Gina talked about the value of customers who review and blog about her products, as their mentions are “worth so much more than straight old, paid advertising because they serve as both an advertisement AND an endorsement from a trusted source.”

HairFix.com advertises using a swapping system with other vegan and eco-friendly businesses. She is also involved in programs that give her “ad benefits online” (site/newsletter mentions) in exchange for donations (e.g., Farm Sanctuary’s Corporate Partners for Compassion program). Giveaways and free product promotions on others’ blogs or websites also generate traffic back to HairFix.com.

Another online business that uses a different set of strategies is ServiceContractors.com. Owner Sam Castronova has created an online, automated workers’ compensation quoting and purchasing engine. On the site, business owners answer a series of questions that formulate the user’s quoted rate in real-time and then are presented with the means to purchase their policy online – and receive a temporary, custom PDF coverage certificate. Sam testifies that Search Engine Marketing (SEM), particularly Google AdWords, has been the most important Internet marketing tool for his company. With a competitive zero-down program, his website gets excellent click through rates (CTR) on Google.

By taking advantage of the capabilities of the Internet, Sam admits he may be a little ahead of his customer demographic who is “…behind when it comes to comfort and willingness to shop online.” Despite this issue, as well as doing business in a highly competitive market, ServiceContractors.com generates consistent sales.

Kathryn Stephens, Director of Development for A Reason to Survive (ARTS), says Facebook and Twitter increase awareness of her non-profit, which promotes the therapeutic powers of art to transform lives for underprivileged children. Social media is used to announce events, acknowledge special gifts and update people about what is happening at the ARTS Center.

On the benefits of blogging, Kathryn states, “We can update immediately and quickly versus having our web designers do it” after email blasts. E-blasts with links to an-easy-to- maintain website are A Reason to Survive’s most effective attention-grabber. Kathryn says that they are now processing on-line donations in-house and that about 25-30% of their donations come through the website. A Reason to Survive provides important services and activities to even more underprivileged children because the Internet has given them a farther-reaching voice.

So, what are the benefits of the Internet for the company with a physical store? Amy Capano, owner of Cathedral, San Diego’s Premier Candle Boutique in Hillcrest says social media allows her to interact with their customers easily and creates a fun environment. They update their customers on the latest products as they come in. Using Twitter and Facebook, Cathedral can reach an audience that their in-store sales team can’t.

Amy says weekly email blasts and Facebook are what she considers among the best Internet tools for drawing sales. The Internet has served Cathedral by attracting more customers and making it easy to remind them about Cathedral’s products.

We’ve touched on just some of the numerous tools the Internet offers to companies and organizations wishing to market online. Social media is a free and easy source of advertising that reaches a potential audience of millions daily. Swapping advertisements is another great way for those small businesses on an advertising budget to get their brands out to the public. Paid programs like Google AdWords or e-marketing tools can also help niche businesses widen their customer base.

How recently a webpage, blog or other content has been updated matters more or less, depending on the type of content—a recipe, for example, could be years old and still be as tasty as the day it was posted. On the other hand, if you’re searching for the latest news about Occupy Oakland, very fresh content is much more relevant to the user so Google is promising to ramp up about 35% of these such results.

There are three types of content impacted by this change to Google’s web search algorithm:

• Recent events or hot topics, like the ongoing news of the day
• Regularly recurring events, like elections, conferences or tournaments, where users are most interested in the most recent occurrence
• Frequent updates, as when shopping for items with numerous model years

In addition to site and social channel publishing being considered strongly for relevancy, Facebook public commenting (on the social site itself or any other utilizing their commenting/sharing applets) the social site itself will now be indexed and may appear in search results. As we’d mentioned in our articles Social Media Management & The Semantic Web: “Voice Matters” and How Facebook’s New Social Networking Features Will Change Digital Marketing, getting conversation about your site or business going on the social media channels has had a demonstrated influence on search engine rankings. This new update from Google is geared towards what has been a rising trend stemming from their “Panda” update beginning rollout last February: show users timely, relevant content. It’s an evolution from giving clout to SEO content farms and a means of distinguishing which online presences are truly “alive”.

This update extends Google’s Caffeine update, an indexing launched in December 2010 which produced 50% fresher results than the previous index. At the time it was released, Google touted Caffeine’s robust foundation, which has made it possible to build an even faster and more comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online. With Caffeine, Google analyzes the web in small portions and update the search index on a continuous basis, globally. As new pages are discovered, or new information on existing pages, these are added straight to the index. That’s what makes it possible for this latest update to function so dynamically as content changes minute by minute.

The good news for Google users is our search results are supposedly going to be, well, more relevant and timely. Will be interesting to see if it operates similarly to the function they’ve had for sorting results by how new (Any time, Past hour, Past 24 hours etc.). This time-sorting functionality seems only to provide truly better results than their default search when querying for news or other topics that truly are time-dependant.

For businesses seeking organic Google traffic and front-page rankings, the golden road may be as simple as ensuring you have at least three channels publishing content: on-site blog, Twitter & Facebook. Make at least one update per-week that is super timely, more if possible. Nearly every industry has something time-sensitive that can be published and shot-around on the social channels to encourage conversation. Timely content and conversation about said content is going to be key to keeping your business relevant on the web.

In a sense, it’s like all businesses wishing for ranking need to become their own publishing outfit, which is a lot of work! Some would say it’s not fair, as rankings based like this will undoubtedly favor companies with the pockets to afford the outsourcing of such publishing. We have developed a package for small to medium businesses who wish to make their voice steadily more prominent on the web via social media management and blog authoring. Contact us to learn how we can affordably add high-quality, search spider-delectable content streams promoting your site’s relevancy, and competitiveness, on the web. We also specialize in search engine optimized, custom WordPress design and development – our of-choice Content Management System (CMS) for adding blogs and e-commerce capacity to sites – in addition to search engine optimized blog writing & copywriting.

Now, social media stories will be more meaningful than than the “like” button on websites has allowed. Users will be able to indicate when they “read,” “listen to” and otherwise interact with various media. Updates appear in the new Facebook ticker automatically, and in the news feed if they’re considered important. Sharing activities, like listening to music, with minimal effort appeals most to the younger, more active, user base.

For marketers, social media today offer major benefits for on-site engagement and syndication. Users will be able to push even more content to the news feed, ticker and timeline, generating more exposure and click backs to sites. Also, as the user experience becomes more personal and engaging, Facebook’s functionality on websites will ultimately provide those sites with an even deeper look into who their visitors are. This information can be applied to pin-point ad targeting and product recommendations as well as product development and inventory decision making.

Two-way relationships between each business and its customer base, in which customers and potential customers share content and activity contextually and nearly frictionlessly via social media will rival good search engine optimization for gaining traffic to business websites into the future. If you are interested in making your voice heard in social media/the semantic web, contact us today so that we may help in ironing out your approach.

This concept of an integrated “voice”, from multiple online outlets, provides much opportunity for SEO. Take the average website hoping for rankings; it’s looking like a site’s search result presence/relevance may be linked to post content from associated social media accounts. This analysis of your “voice” across the web points focus on the relevancy of your Facebook or Twitter updates to your main site’s content, how many people shared or re-tweeted one of your posts, how many followers or likes you have, etc. Thinking from the perspective of how a search engine would best measure a site’s relevancy, or ranking, the more engaging your online publishing, the more relevant your entire online presence becomes (potentially) in the search engines’ eyes.

Publishing engaging and interesting online content that is a) relevant to your main site and b) worthy of being shared, liked or otherwise “socialized” online is likely the next best thing by which search engines can judge a site’s ranking. By this logic, an active and engaged online social media voice may be a current focus in the ever evolving refinement of search results.

There are many more benefits to getting your website’s voice heard in the “semantic web”, for instance check out our next blog post: How Facebook’s New Social Networking Features Will Change Digital Marketing.

The Landing Page

The page where the traffic you are paying for to land, is it your home page? A product listing? If it’s designed as anything but a landing, squeeze or pitch page you are most likely losing conversions. Having a page specifically designed to capture the few seconds of attention you garner from paid marketing can mean the difference between an email signup, product purchase or other user interaction. Some of the favorite landing page designs we’ve done can be seen here.

Leveraging Organic & Paid SERPs

Getting organically on page one (P1) of Google can take months to years of search engine optimization and content generation, OR you can pay to have your site show above or to the right of organic results. The latter is search marketing, where your text advertisement shows in a highlighted manner aside from “regular” search results, your positioning secured by a rather complex system of bidding against competition. Your ad only shows when people search for terms you “bid” on, so the traffic derived is in a sense already interested and somewhat informed about what you are selling.

The payment for your search positioning is incurred each time a user clicks your result ad.* The greatest benefits of search marketing are that it’s trackable (so many analytics available to help steer where you invest your marketing dollars), testable (a/b and multivariate testing to dial in which elements on your page convert better than others; remember it takes about 100 visitors per test instance to derive enough data to make judgements on whether a marketing tweak was impressionable), and it’s easy to have a guest consultation on an existing account.

Whether you are seeking the lowest cost per acquisition in PPC, AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter, Yahoo! or SEO, we will likely help you out! Do you already have your own (~experimental) AdWords set up already?  One step ahead of the game!  Wouldn’t hurt to have an expert take a look to make sure you aren’t overspending.  We know how to optimize for the lowest cost!

Lead Distribution / Management:

After building out a network of demographically targeted landing pages, and having search marketing campaigns researched and built out, you’ll be getting some great exclusive leads. If you wish to re-sell these leads (within reason, three times max to be both fair to competition and consumer), the landing page form data will need to be processed through a lead management system. The clients who purchase leads are set up in a queue in a system like this, where leads that come in can be distributed in a round-robin fashion.

There is quite a range of products available to serve this purpose, a favorite cloud solution being Baberdoo though for a startup there is no better value than Click Point Software’s LeadExec Vendor Edition for managing lead distribution. All lead management systems have a steep learning curve, and with some you’ll be paying in part for good support. Basically this system tracks all leads that come through your forms, and distributes them to a queue of clients via email or post.  Leads are also available in their web-based system for your clients to log in and view, as well as make new orders!

Client Management, CRM

A Client Resource Manager (CRM) is what a sales team uses to manage their leads as well as clients.  A CRM can have routing capacity (similar to a lead management system but internally to your sales team) as well as followup settings & calendars to maximize ROI on gaining and managing recurring accounts.  There are myriad solutions available, SalesForce’s client resource manager is really snappy, great design as well as support – though for a monthly cost. On the other hand there’s SugarCRM, which is a free (Open Source) system which can be set up by us (including three hours of timely one-on-one screen-share/phone/email/chat support) for an initial setup cost plus a nominal yearly hosting fee. SugarCRM can also easily be set up when signed up with monthly hosting at LiquidWeb (think “one-click-install”).

Our Lead Gen Experience

From early last decade, mortgage boom to bust to now, we’ve been based in San Diego and involved in the successful conversion optimization of landing pages for verticals ranging from education, tax resolution, real-time insurance quoting, e-commerce, mortgage origination, reverse mortgage, loan modification, web design, debt settlement, travel, energy drinks and more.

After nearly ten years of working with several lead generation companies we started our own purely search engine marketed lead generation company, HowMuchCouldYouSave.com, where we kept many clients very happy in the loan modification and debt solutions sectors (used LeadExec by the way). Regulations basically killed both industries so now we focus more on consulting and improving conversion rates upwards of 20%.

Be aware that search marketing competition, especially for popular lead generation verticals like loan modification, can be ruthless; there is a reason why lead generation has a reputation for being wrought with ripoffs. It can be difficult to compete as a company that doesn’t do anything black hat or dishonest. Park Blvd. Marketing’s online marketing and lead generation guru Adrian Huth weighs in on this dirty state of the lead generation industry on LeadCritic.com, check it out here.

Contact us today for a free lead generation consultation!

*There is also a monthly option to have your account managed closely that we offer. Search signals are important to keep updated monthly to help your organic rankings, we also offer search engine optimized microblogging services.

1. Write articles that will in essence bait people to share in their social circles. Social referencing of your site, and especially sharing or re-tweeting of your feed, is what you need to go for. Articles like ‘Top 5 Foo’ grab people’s attention because five tips are usually a quick read, and may be more likely to be re-tweeted or otherwise shared. The more content on your site that’s referenced ‘socially’, the better.
2. Make sure the content on your site is not only unique, but well written. Poor spelling can purportedly penalize search engine rankings, though making sure the content provided is useful and relevant is key as well for gaining distinguished rankings.
3. Publish articles on other websites and have anchored links back to your site. ‘Anchored’ linking in this case refers to wrapping the actual link around text that is relevant to what is being linked to, rather than just a ‘click here’. The key is that the tags must wrap text that is relevant to your site, including keywords for which you wish to be ranked.
4. On your own site, publish two, ~thousand word articles weekly. To best optimize them for the search engines be sure to include keyword suggestions sussed from analytics and keyword research. We can help you with this.
5. Consistently update Twitter and Facebook every other day if you can – this promises to increase your site’s rankings and is great branding for your followers. Personally I’m disappointed when a business I like doesn’t have an active Facebook or Twitter feed. On the contrary, brands that have interesting feeds are stuck in my head – a lot! Social media management can have fantastic results for both branding and semantically ranking your voice on the web.

We realize that finding the time to produce content for your site can prove difficult, though it’s becoming more widely understood as a solid investment to maintain or boost your rankings. For the month of June we are offering a convenient service package to help you out! Have two search engine optimized microblogs written per week (think short enough to Tweet, though it will also be shared on your Facebook feed) for one month – only $75! Call now (619) 309-8537 to learn more or contact us here!

As the three main pillars of service that ProSound provides are electronic and pro audio music gear repair/service, product sales and sound system installations we highlighted these on the home page both in the form of a rotator and with short descriptions and headlines underneath for each. Also found on the homepage of this website design, towards the bottom, are a featured blog/article entry as well as two featured products. These are delivered dynamically, meaning the client can check a box on the administrative dashboard to determine which blog/article and products are to be broadcast on the home page. Pretty nifty!

From the navigation, if you click on ‘News’ you’ll see their blog, or article repository. ProSound hired us to write the initial blog entries, which are all search engine optimized using Google’s keyword research tool – the results of which we determine the best keywords to integrate into the writing. Often-times our clients want to have a blog set up only to find they don’t have the time-bandwidth to actually write the blogs! We have on-staff seasoned copywriters who can ‘ghostwrite’ blogs in addition to maintaining FaceBook profiles or Twitter pages.

Reference the navigation again and click on ‘Products’ to see the store that we set up for ProSound. The store we have set up for them has search engine-friendly URI structures (in simple terms the URL contains keywords relevant to the product). Many e-commerce solutions cannot boast about this, as their product pages are delivered with URI structures devoid of any keywords and instead back-end codes and symbols that are useless for search engine ranking. ProSound’s store also has search engine optimized META tags for page title and description – also imperative for search engine ranking.

A website design is an ongoing process, especially when built on WordPress as upgrades are regularly needed. Design updates, content changes and more must be regularly addressed. The tradeoff is that the client can make updates to their site’s content from WordPress’ administrative interface, called the ‘Dashboard’. If you’d like to learn more about our affordable, best web design and e-commerce solutions in San Diego and beyond, click here to contact us today or call: (619) 309-8537!

Also, we have a Spring Cleaning Web Work sale going on this season, with 15% off of all of our services! If you’d like to inquire about how our custom web design can enhance your business, or how online marketing can drive traffic to your website, click here or call (619) 309-8537 to contact San Diego’s Boutique Web Agency!

If you would like a free consultation about how optimized landing page design may be the missing link in getting an ROI from your current online marketing, we can be contacted here or by calling (619) 309-8537. While we are located in San Diego we service the world.

Loan modification marketing is as expensive as it is competitive (pretty much a marketing rule-of-thumb). Considering the costs involved with getting a loan modification business on the first page of the major search engines, you’d think that landing page optimization would be a huge priority, right? It seems logical that the higher the cost of marketing, the more likely the business would want make their landing page as sharp as possible to eek out as many conversions as possible (a conversion being the saught after action, i.e. a phone call or form submission). In the loan modification PPC world, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

To bring home what we are seeing we will give a mere two examples, though you can see plenty more just perusing the sponsored search results (again, be mindful as described above as simply ‘clicking’ is expensive to the company), of companies that would benefit greatly from some conversion rate optimization. Landing pages are specifically designed to capture the user’s short attention span after they have clicked through to your page. This is where the three pillars of landing page conversion rate optimization come in: You need to instill trust, sell yourself from competition and compel an action all in a matter of seconds. These two examples do not follow these rules, and after showing why, we will demonstrate how much can be saved or sussed out from returns on marketing investments by investing a few hundred dollars into a well designed landing page.

First, let’s examine Brigman Loan Modification. Here is a screen shot of their landing page:

A good thing (possibly the only) about this page is that the ‘home page’ is actually the landing page. Cmpanies quite often direct paid traffic directly to a home page that has no calls to action, no form and/or phone number or any of the standard pillars of landing page optimization (this we will see in the next example). Brigman’s landing page follows the basic layout and landing page marketing pillars however the execution is quite offputting. Our first impression when viewing this page was that they are time-warping from over a decade ago as if they knew somehow in 1998 (about when this landing page design would have ‘fit in’) that a mortgage crisis was going to happen. Joking aside, there is nothing professional about this design. Would you go to a law firm that was in an office that looked like a shanty town? Even if it had a sign that stated ‘A Professional Law Firm’, as this page does?

Maybe this ‘Professional Law Firm’ is doing so incredibly well that they can afford to be throwing thousands of dollars away a month by not having a conversion optimized landing page. What could be improved is: a) modernization of the design (unless you have been living under a rock this has got to be obvious, no need to elaborate too much but… smoother edges, smoother font usage, more engaging colors, a more web 2.0-style submit button); b) a form that follows standard design principals i.e. isn’t ‘center aligned’, uses consistent font faces (at first glance I see Arial and Times New Roman in the same form), is larger and easier to use, has a clearer, bolder more colorful call to action and proper capitalization as well as a bigger, bolder arrow pointing to the TOP of the form, not below the submit button where it’s currently drawing the eye to some dead space.

Here is the second example of a landing page that could be optimized to save the company tons of marketing dollars: SB Law Center. Here is a screen shot of their landing page, which is essentially their home page:

From our experience, having too many options (read: links) decreases the chance of the desired action you wish to get from the user (read: conversion). Many clients come to us thinking that it must be important to instill trust through a multi-page site with ample information to convince the user that the company is legit. This of course depends on the audience, and in many cases this is true. With loan modifications, a very over-saturated market, you need to make your point very fast in order to get them to act i.e. call or sumbit their information. Once you have captured their contact information or received a phone call, the user can be contacted immediately and through a one-on-one sales call you have more control over the close than you would if you’d left the user to hang out browsing around your site.

This page has nearly twenty links. How long did it take you to find the ‘Apply Now’ button? The phone number however is quite prevalent so chances are that they receive many more call-ins than form submissions. Note that as you navigate around the site, the phone isn’t as prevalent on every page. Also note that the phone number is missing a call to action (i.e. call now to get a free mortgage analysis).

Now, consider this: Getting first or second positioning in Google’s sponsored results for loan modification-related keywords can cost between $6-$10 per click. Let’s first define a ‘conversion rate’ to be, on average, the ratio of how many clicks happen before a conversion happens. So, say after a company’s ad receives 100 clicks to their landinge page they get 18 conversions – that would be STELLAR. The average ‘sweet spot’ is 10-12 conversions per 100 clicks, or a 10-12% conversion rate (this we easily accomplish with a first-draft landing page design though we have, after testing, seen conversions upwards of 20%).

We have no way to ascertain what conversion rates the landing pages exemplified above are experiencing as they are not our own and we do not handle their marketing, though we’d assume they are lingering around 5-7%. So, let’s say they are paying $8 per click and getting 6 conversion per 100 clicks (6% conversion rate). That means they are paying $800 for 6 conversions, or $133 for 1 conversion. Now consider that if they were to implement design changes in accordance with what we define as the three pillars of conversion optimized landing page design (instill trust, sell yourself from competition and compel an action all in a matter of seconds), with a first-draft landing page they would see an increase to a 10% conversion rate. This enhancement would lower the cost-per-conversion by $53 as they’d be getting 10 conversions per $800 of marketing. The ROI is blantant, especially when you consider that the cost of having a landing page like this created is only $750.

If you would like a free consultation regarding how to optimize your PPC campaigns with conversion optimized landing page design contact us today.