Week 11 - MKTG 348 - SEO - Best Practices For SEO Local

When you are optimizing for a local search engine, there are four practices which you should do.  The first one is to include your clients' websites to local search engines.  There are three site which you should primarily focus on if you want a high rank.  These sites are: Google Local Business Center, Yahoo! Local Merchant, and Ask Business Search.  The second best practice is to submit your clients' listings to popular directories and Internet Yellow Pages.  There are plenty of directories out there to choose from.  Some good directories to start with include: yelp.com, citysquares.com, mojopages.com, and insiderpages.com.  You can also greatly increase your clients' visibility on the web by utilizing Internet Yellow Pages.  Sites like SuperPages.com, Switchboard.com, and Yellowpages.com are good sources to start with.

The third best practice for local SEO is to set your geographic location in Google's Webmasters Tools.  In order to achieve a higher rank on local search results, you must find detailed reporting on your pages' visibility on Google.  Google's Webmasters Tools is a great resource for getting this type of information.  The last best practice for SEO local is to include contact information on your website.  By adding an address in your address tag and a phone number, you are increasing your credibility to the search engines.

Week 9 - MKTG 349 - Making A Profit On Your Campaign

Success in investments usually is measured in profits.  So how can you generate the biggest ROI on your AdWords campaign? There are three stages one must go through in order to start earning a profit and increasing your return on investment.  The three stages are: testing, growth, and maturity.


The first stage, testing, consists of gathering data about your performance and determining which CPC, keyword(s), ad combinations work best.  The main goal in this stage is to establish a profit by comparing your costs to revenues.  The minute you start earning a profit, you are ready to move on to the next stage, growth.


In the growth stage, your priority is to gain more customers all the while generating a profit.  The best way to do this is by increasing your budget, but still leaving your bids and keyword(s) and ad text the same.  If you begin to see a decrease in your profits, revert back to your old strategy, or perhaps even adjust your bids, keywords, and ad text.


The final stage is maturity.  When your costs do not reach your daily budget and you have a profit then you have successfully scaled up to the traffic available.  This means you have successfully matured your AdWords account and are earning exceptional ROI.  Some characteristics in this stage are: your budget is high enough to show at all times, and your daily costs, profits, and sales all fluctuate regularly in correlation with search volume.

Week 9 - MKTG 348 - SEO - On Page Optimization Factors

There are many factors that go into on page optimization.  It is important to have a telephone number and an address on your page.  This helps search engines identify the type of business you are in.  It is important to use what is called geographical qualifiers.  These "qualifiers" are city names, county names, state names, and streets in title tags.  Adding these qualifiers gives your location more prominence on search engines.  There are also many outside factors that improve your on page optimization. 







The first factor is offsite optimization. Offsite optimization is adding anchor texts to incoming links in order to hold local qualifiers.  The second factor is to submit your local business to the big search engines.  The big search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask) have a local business center which is made exclusively for small businesses.  These small companies should submit their business to these search engines and include information such as: address, city, state, and a brief description of you company.  After doing this, the search engines will include your company on local search results for users to view.  The last factor is to take advantage of other search engines such as yellow pages and other directories.  These types of sites receive heavy amounts of web traffic each day looking for companies and information on them.  Good sites to take advantage of are: yelp, yellow pages, local, infousa, citysearch, and superpages.

Week 8 - MKTG 349 - Understand The Landing Page Experience

The landing page experience details how good someone thinks someone's experience has been on a landing page.  There are many ways to improve your landing page experience.  So why does the landing page experience matter?  Tuning up your landing page will increase an overall better experience for your audience. There are three ways to improve your landing pages.  The first one is to include relevant, useful, and original content.  You need to make sure your landing page correlates with the content from your site.

The second way to improve your landing page is through transparency and trustworthiness.  Building trust is key in everything.  So to be trustworthy is crucial in having a great landing page experience.  Your visitors also must be able to find your landing page easily.  Distinguishing yourself from advertisements and explaining to your visitors why you are taking their personal information and what you are doing with it, will build your trustworthiness and make you more transparent.

The final way to improve your landing page experience is to make navigation of your page easy.  If visitors have to search all over the place for your page, you're doing something wrong and the experience will be a bad one.  If your site contains a purchase page, make it quick and easy for people to order the product.  It is important not to have any pop-ups on your page as it will annoy your visitors and could cause them to leave.  Lastly, provide useful information about your product or service that your visitors can read and learn about.

Week 8 - MKTG 348 - SEO - Blog Optimization

It is important that you optimize your blog.  Without optimization your blog will be an enigma an the world wide web.  There are six ways in which you can optimize your blog.  The first way is just by creating simple content.  This is one of the best ways to optimizing your blog.  The second way to optimizing your blog is through search engine submissions.  A great way to do this is by having as much relevant content as you can.  Search engines always prefer bigger websites with lots of content.
Another great way to optimize your blog is through keywords.  Integrating popular keywords in your blog gives you a competitive advantage.  Doing a keyword research will help you understand what your audience is searching for and what keywords they are using.  Another great way to optimize your blog is to optimize your blog template. Make sure your post title shows up on search engines in its entirety.  Also make sure you append you title.  The last way to optimize your blog is to update your blog regularly.  When you update your blog and make changes and add to it, search engines will index these new updates.

So what are the advantages to blog optimization?  First it increases your rankings on search engines, thus facilitating the SEO process.  Optimization also increases your visitors, increase website trafficking.  Essentially, when you optimize your blog, more people will see your blog and you can begin to build up an audience.  The more popular you become, and if you follow the six ways to optimizing your blog, you will be ranked very high on search engines.

Week 8 - MKTG 348 - Hubspot - Importance of Customer Delight

The final methodology in inbound marketing is delight.  It is very important to keep your existing customers happy.  Usually, companies are always looking to attract new customers, and they have their time and energy on these prospective customers.  This leaves the existing customers feeling left out.  The facts show that it is 6-7x more expensive to attract and obtain new customers then it is to keep existing customers.  Only 7% of customers say their customers service experience has been better than their expectations.

These stats show that there is a huge opportunity for companies.  These advantages are not only financial, but also consistency among customers and companies.  It is important to develop relationships with your customers.  Relationships help build trust, and trust is important to creating a great inbound experience.  Inbound experience is built by the people and it is made for the people.

Week 7 - MKTG 349 - Setting A Budget

After setting up your campaign, you need to set up a daily budget.  Base your budget off of your advertising goals and how much you are willing to spend.  The average cost-per-click (CPC) is 10 cents.  So if you are expecting 100 clicks each day, set your budget to $10 per day.  If you are more comfortable budgeting your campaign on a monthly basis, you can calculate how much you will spend per day by dividing your monthly budget by 30.4, the average amount of days in each month.

Now that you know the amount of money you are willing to spend. You need to understand that this budget only applies to one campaign.  You set your budget up through a few steps.  The first step is to click on the campaign tab.  Under this tab, click on the + and select the type of campaign you would like to run.  Under the select campaign setting, scroll down until you find "Budget" and enter your daily budget.  After selecting a daily budget, you are all set and your campaign is ready to run.