Are Filters The Future Of Search Engines? April 28, 2014

Are Filters The Future Of Search Engines?

Last Friday, Google announced a new filter that comes along with their search engine for when you’re searching for local restaurants.

The different options within the filter allow people to search for restaurants within their price range, whether the user only wants restaurants with good reviews to pop up, what food you want, and (my favorite) if the restaurant is open currently.

When you can narrow down a search based on your preferences, it saves time and makes the user experience exponentially better. And for those that forget, a good user experience is, and will always be the #1 thing Google cares about.

As a professional internet marketing prognosticator, I can see this filter being successful and Google possibly creating a filter for every business industry.

If that does happen, where filters start to peculate every business industry, it’s a good thing for marketers.

Almost every client I talk to has a specific type of customer they want. And if Google uses filters to determine what type of customer is searching, it’ll allow marketers to target the customer the client wants.

For instance, if a small business runs a steakhouse, they won’t want to get clicks for somebody that types “restaurant los angeles” into Google, but that person that’s searching doesn’t even like steak. So the the small business steakhouse has no chance getting the searcher as a customer. But with the filter, it could eliminate the chance that the searcher clicks on steakhouse ad by filtering out steakhouses.

We shall see what Google does from here!

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How To Do Content Marketing April 24, 2014

How To Do Content Marketing

The two most effective techniques in search engine optimization right now in 2014 is brand building and content marketing. My post yesterday covered a lot of ground on why building your brand is important and how to do it. Today, I want to quickly touch on how to do content marketing.

So what makes content marketing most effective? It’s not about who can write the best.

At Google, the engineers over there philosophically look at each person doing a search as “someone having a question”. And then the websites that are on the 1st page are “possible answers to the searcher’s question”.

So how can a business do content marketing to produce better SEO results and increase sales specifically?

Blog. A lot. And focus on keywords your potential customers search for. And be specific. Everybody writes about “limo service in san diego”. But how many limo service companies have content on “limo service for comic con” or “limo del hotel”. Potential customers actually type these keywords in to Google!

So imagine if you’re a business person going to Comic Con in San Diego. And you want to take a limo to the convention. It’s important to you the driver knows where they’re going so you might type “limo comic con” into Google. And just imagine your relief when you find a website that has a blog post talking about how they specialize in providing limo service for Comic Con and know all the in’s and out’s. So not only is it likely you call that limo company. It’s also likely you become their customer.

Same thing if you’re staying at the Grand Del Mar Hotel and need a limo to the airport. You want a limo company close by that drive you to the airport. And you do a search for “limo grand del hotel” and then find a limo service with a blog talking about how you know exactly where the hotel is and the best and quickest route to take to San Diego Airport. Once again, pretty likely that person not only calls, but becomes your customer.

And if you’re Google, this is the content you want to rank on the 1st page because for people going to Comic Con or people needing transportation from the Del Hotel, your content will answer their question.

So not only do you get your website on the 1st page of Google, but you’re also increasing the conversion rate between phone calls to new customers.

This is effective content marketing in 2014.

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How Do I Know If Someone Really Knows How To Do SEO? April 24, 2014

How Do I Know If Someone Really Knows How To Do SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is very polarizing.

My opinion on SEO is that it can be effective in the right situation. For instance, for a limo service is a small town, SEO can work due to lack of competition. Or for a machine shop that does precision grinding, they can have success with SEO due to the lack of competition in that niche industry. For a limo service in Los Angeles, SEO will just waste your time and money.

Why do small businesses still have bad experiences with people they hire to do SEO?

In my experience, I’ve found the #1 reason is because small businesses will sometimes hire people that don’t know what they’re doing. For me, I can spot these people very easily when they list what they do in their SEO work and I see techniques they do that real professionals stopped doing years ago because the technique is either obsolete or no longer effective. Unfortunately for the small business, they probably have no idea which techniques are relevant in 2014 and which aren’t.

The 2nd main reason small businesses have bad experiences with people doing SEO is because whoever is doing the SEO doesn’t care if their work has success or not. They look at the business relationship they have with the client as short term. Get as much money as you can, while you can. Then the leach can move on to another host….errrr… I mean then the SEO person can move onto another small business.

So how can small business protect themselves and figure out if the person or company they’re talking to actually knows how to do search engine optimization effectively?

The best way is to ask a lot of questions on what the person is going to do in their SEO work and why they do it. Real professionals will be able to give you a specific list of what they do and articulate the value of each technique. People that don’t know what they’re doing will usually give general, vague answers with not a lot of details. And then when you ask them to articulate the value of each technique, they really struggle.

People that know search engine optimization and how to use it effective know exactly what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.

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Google Favors Brands In SEO. So Make Your Small Business A Brand With Banner Ads. April 23, 2014

Google Favors Brands In SEO. So Make Your Small Business A Brand With Banner Ads.

What I’m about to write about covers a lot of ground, so I want to summarize everything here and then go into greater detail on each point in future blog posts.

-The consensus in the SEO community is that Google more and more is favoring brands when it comes to search engine optimization. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land fame even addresses this in the first question of a recent interview. Sullivan’s key point is that Google is not just favoring big brands over small brands. Google is favoring ANY brand over websites no one cares about (in other words, non-brands).

-So how does Google determine who is a brand and who isn’t? That type of thing could be subjective. But I believe the main determining factor is based off of how many people search for a particular brand by name. For instance, there’s probably way more people that do a Google search for “McDonald’s” than “Joe’s World Famous Burgers”.

-And the great thing with small business is that there’s lots of industries that don’t have a dominant super power in their market. Take the limo service industry for example. There’s no national, household name that the mainstream automatically turns to. Therefore, a limo company only has to compete with other small business limo companies. Therefore, success can be achieved when it comes to boosting a small business into becoming more of a brand than the next small business limo company that isn’t doing anything.

-So how does a small business boost brand awareness? Isn’t that expensive? In 2014, it is not.

-The answer is with website banner advertising.

-Nielsen, that does the local TV ratings, put out a report in February that said the average cost of reaching 300,000 people in a local market with TV advertising costs $7,500. Pretty expensive. But the cost of reaching 300,000 people in a local market with banner ads on websites cost only $100. Pretty incredible, right?

-The key thing to understand is that the value of banner ads is not to get clicks to your website to produce sales leads. The value is the same as TV advertising. It’s to become more well known and have “top-of-the-mind awareness”. The same reason Coke still advertises and Taco Bell still advertises. Everybody knows who they are. But they want to be fresh in your memory in case you get hungry or thirsty.

-Most people don’t click on banner ads. But people do notice them. And after 6 months, 1 year, 2 years of advertising, people in your local area will start to know who you are.

-And when the time comes for people who finally have a need for your product or service, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll think of your company because of all the reminders your banner ads have given them.

-When this happens, you’ll see a gradual increase in the number of people searching your company name on Google. Thus making your company name more of a brand and favorable in the search rankings.

-Why would Google favor brands in search engine optimization? I remember reading a story almost 10 years ago when BMW was using SEO tactics Google didn’t like. And Google warned them to stop, but BMW kept doing it. So Google decided to punish BMW and removed bmw.com from the search engine! And at the time, Google thought “Ha! That’ll show you BMW!” But the unexpected happened. It was Google that experienced the backlash. Because people typed “bmw” into Google and when BMW’s website didn’t pop up, people thought Google’s search engine wasn’t working.

-So the main reason Google has always favored brands and is now favoring them even more is that when people search for things, they want to see brands they’re familiar with.

-Imagine this. Let’s say you have more than 1 million people see your banner ad for your limo service business at least 5 times within the span of 1 year. People in your local area become familiar with who you are. And then they search for a limo company in their area and your company, one of the most well known limo companies in your city, doesn’t pop up on the 1st page. Guess what? That makes Google look bad, like it’s search engine isn’t working. The same way people got upset when they couldn’t find BMW’s website.

-It means that consumers have an expectation with Google’s search engine that the most well known companies should pop up first and then smaller brands or no name brands underneath.

-So to come full circle with my point, besides creating specific keyword related content, making your business a brand in your local area, is the most effective and most important search engine optimization tactic in 2014.

-And I don’t see Google changing their importance on brands anytime soon.

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Taco Bell Creates Best Ad Campaign I’ve Seen In Awhile March 31, 2014

Taco Bell Creates Best Ad Campaign I’ve Seen In Awhile

People love drama. It’s one of the main things that attracts us to movies and TV. We love watching conflict. This Taco Bell advertisement does all this in their latest ad campaign.

When watching the commercial, I’m first thinking how clever Taco Bell was at finding people named Ronald McDonald. Then I wondered if it was even legal to do what they were doing, copyright speaking. Then I wondered if these people’s real names were actually Ronald McDonald. Then I saw McDonald’s response on Twitter and thought, wow, what a lazy response. There is for sure 3 big lessons to be learned here.

First off, what is Taco Bell’s purpose in this ad campaign? It’s to build awareness that they now have a breakfast menu. That’s it. They want people to know. With this ad campaign, they’ve done that. One of the best ways to attract attention is to create controversy and that’s what they’ve done targeting McDonald’s.

Second, McDonald’s had a chance to leach attention off of Taco Bell’s ad dollars. They had a chance to create awareness for something new they were doing. Maybe even to say their breakfast menu was better and that the Egg McMuffin is famous or something. But all McDonald’s could muster was, “Ronald still prefers McDonald’s.” What a wasted opportunity. It’s like they were either lazy or just flat out caught off guard.

But lastly, the big lesson here for small business is that the number one goal of advertising is to create awareness. But a close second, is that you want to leave a positive impression with your targeted audience. My main point is that lots of ad dollars and blanket advertising and big audience reach numbers are nice, but there is definitely a value in ad creative as we’ve seen with Taco Bell.

When creative ad messaging can be advertised in big numbers, there’s a chance to hit a real home run.

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Study Says Majority Of People’s Attention On Smartphone, TV Just Background Noise March 23, 2014

Study Says Majority Of People’s Attention On Smartphone, TV Just Background Noise

I can completely believe this study. For instance, it’s very common for my wife to be sitting on the couch watching YouTube on her phone, while the TV is on. But she’s not paying attention to the TV. Meanwhile, I’m in the home office and my attention primary on my computer. And from time to time I’ll glance at the TV. Then fast forward through the commercials. Just another piece of evidence confirming that the TV advertising business is on a slow decline. And the internet advertising business is growing.

 

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I Think People Underestimate How Many People Are On The Internet March 23, 2014

I Think People Underestimate How Many People Are On The Internet

What I’m about to say is more theory on my part than actual fact. I think when people think of reaching an enormous amount of people, they think of TV.

I’m just here to share how many people have been on entertainment related websites in January 2014. Nielsen says that the number is 167 million people in the United States. YouTube alone got a little over 110 million people in that one month with each person averaging 12 visits throughout the month.

Overall, there were 198 million Americans online in January 2014. Average time each person spent online throughout the month? 29 hours and 43 minutes.

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Apps Take Up 90% Of Internet Time On Smartphones, Browsers Take Up 10% On Smartphones March 23, 2014

Apps Take Up 90% Of Internet Time On Smartphones, Browsers Take Up 10% On Smartphones

To me, this report from Nielsen shows that people might know what the internet is. They might know that their cell phones now connect to the internet. They definitely know what Google is. They’ve figured out how to download apps on their cell phone. But this report shows people still aren’t comfortable navigating the internet in the regular mobile browsers. Like using the url aka, address bar.

So what does this mean for marketers and small businesses? With the majority of internet use shifting from regular computers to mobile devices and 90% of these people using apps to navigate the internet on their mobile device, every small business should have their own mobile app. The last thing you should want is for someone wanting to find your phone # or other info on your website, but that user decides not to look it up because you don’t have an app where they can easily access the content.

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Google Finally Unveils “Smart Watches” That Connect To Internet March 19, 2014

Google Finally Unveils “Smart Watches” That Connect To Internet

They’re finally here!! Google finally has unveiled it’s much anticipated “smart watch”. Watches that little display screens that act like mini computers. Even smaller than cell phones! We’ve already seen how much smart phones have taken off. So it’d be a wise assumption that the US consumers will adopt the watches in the same way. So for us marketers, making sure our websites are “smart watch” compatible and show up properly on watches will become a new part of the job description. To me, the more devices there are out there that connect to the internet, the more website traffic and online marketing opportunities there will be : )

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Content Gets You On Google’s 1st Page In Organic Section March 19, 2014

Content Gets You On Google’s 1st Page In Organic Section

The search engine optimization (seo) people are funny. Years ago, I decided to stop being one of the SEO people that look for shortcuts to get on Google organically. I decided that if anyone was going to pay Customwave for SEO, we would focus on content. Because throughout all the years of existence, Google has always and will continue to always reward websites with superior content. But there are still people looking for flaws in Google’s algorithm to give them a shortcut. It’s a teachable moment because i think it says something about society in general. A lot of people would rather spend a whole bunch of money going from temporary shortcut to temporary shortcut having mixed results. Rather than putting out hard work that is tried and true that produces way better results. Usually the most successful people in business are those that work the hardest. Not those that are always looking for ways to work less.

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