Online Marketing Blog

The average conversion rate for a website is around 3 percent, but many websites convert at 10 percent or higher.  What are they doing right that you’re missing?

Bryan Eisenberg, NY Times Bestselling Author gave a solo presentation on the secrets of top converting websites and how you too can achieve high conversion results.   Following is a summary of his presentation.

What exactly is conversion rate?  In essence, conversion rate is a measure of your ability to persuade visitors to take the action you want them to take.  It’s a reflection of your marketing effectiveness and customer satisfaction.  For you to achieve your marketing goals, visitors must achieve their goals first.

No one should settle for a conversion rate of less than 10%.  Looking at top retailers, many have conversion rates greater than 15% monthly.  What are they doing that you’re not?

Search Engine Strategies San Francisco is upon us and marks a watershed year for this event.  For the first time the annual August conference hosts in San Francisco and integrates with Connected Marketing Week, boosting an already large happening to an all-inclusive digital marketing experience.

In addition to TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden presenting on several sessions as both speaker (Content Marketing Optimization & Blog SEO) and moderator (Selling Search to the C-Suite), TopRank team members (myself and Mike Yanke) will be out in force liveblogging the event.

During the 2009 conference we put together the “Search and Social Media Puzzle“.  Our 2010 conference coverage will be no different.  Online Marketing Blog readers won’t miss a thing.  We’re all familiar with such phrases as “content is king” and “context is queen.”  So this year, we’ll be helping you outsmart competitors, think strategically and “make the right moves” with expert advice from industry thought leaders.

Sponsored by JenKaneCo, well known social media evangelist Brian Solis recently gave a presentation to an enthusiastic group of marketers in downtown Minneapolis to introduce the concepts behind his new book:  Engage! The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate and Measure Success in the New Web. The following is an overview of his presentation:

Relations vs. Relationships

There’s something interesting that’s happening right now on the web:  relations are starting to matter more than relationships.  The key lesson for marketers, and what the rest of this overview discusses, is that people will engage around content that compels them in networks where that content spreads.

Web Analytics are a key indicator to the health and performance of any website, but online marketers often get lost in the complexities and details, forgetting how important analytics actually are and why.

Analytics can provide a wealth of information but marketers often look at high level indicators such as: top content, bounce rates, entrance sources and keywords without tying it all together. In most cases, there is a tremendous amount of insight that can be used to make smarter marketing decisions, but most companies barley scratch the surface. At the OMS Minneapolis event last week  Adam Proehl gave an excellent presentation on analytics failures and successes. I’ve taken my notes from that presentation and combined them with my own opinions to create this list.

Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing CEO gave the opening keynote of Online Marketing Summit Minneapolis.  Lee spoke on the intersection of SEO and social media and provided key takeaways for companies on achieving success.

As the social web and search engines integrate and innovate tighter, the intersection between search and social is growing more meaningful daily.  Following is a summation of this info-packed presentation:

What would happen if your Google traffic disappeared tomorrow?  What impact would that have on your marketing and your business?  For many, this could be disastrous.  This highlights the importance of diversifying your brand’s referring sources and share of voice around the web.

Search and social are intersecting in many ways:  when you look at a comparison of the top search engines, more and more of the engines themselves are on social platforms, and more of the results on the big engines are social.

Web video is hot. Some say your chance to be a pioneer.

How hot, and how much of an opportunity? Recent reports from comScore, consistently say more than 80% of the total U.S. Internet audience views online video in a given month. YouTube’s fact sheet states every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to the network and 2 billion videos are being watched per day.

All this popularity has of course been driving a trend with marketers: the desire to create video as part of their digital marketing mix. Except sadly, it’s almost never approached strategically.

Agency-side marketing/PR/digital pros: how many times have you had a client approach you after creating a web video and said “hey, we made this video, now make it go viral!”

Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google delivered the morning keynote on day two of Search Engine Strategies Toronto.  Maile discussed Google’s approach to helping site owners and shared answers to burning questions from the moderator and audience.

The format was a Q&A, and the following is a summary of the best questions and answers from the session.

How did you get to Google?

I studied computer science/artificial intelligence in college.  From that point on, I went into information retrieval and then joined the department of defense.  Then I took some time off, and eventually joined Google.  I’ve now been at Google for 5 years.

After a previous update, we heard a story of someone ranking #1 who lost positioning (and was previously making $10,000/month just from that one ranking).  The same thing again seems to be happening with the Mayday update.  What exactly is that it?

It’s a common story: an online marketing professional returns from a conference full of exciting new ideas and tactics, only to fail at selling those ideas internally.  In many cases, marketing and IT/development professionals don’t always understand each other, and as a result potentially high value projects stall out and never see the light of day.

How can you get your marketing and IT teams working together?  The following panel of speakers moderated by Tracy Falke, Social Media Specialist at Freestyle Interactive tackle the subject matter:

• Jonathan Allen, Director, SearchEngineWatch
• Puneet Bhasin, Independent IT Consultant,
• Casey Rovinelli, Director, Digital Marketing, National Hockey League Players’ Association

Casey Rovinelli, Director, Digital Marketing, National Hockey League Players’ Association

At the recent Minneapolis Integrated Marketing Summit, TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden moderated an exciting panel of a diverse group of SEO professionals:

• Alex Bennert – Chief Search Strategist at The Wall Street Journal
• Brian Kleisner – Search Engine Marketing Manager for FindLaw
• Bill Leake – CEO of Apogee Results

The focus of the panel was on search engine optimization best practices, and panelists discussed everything from leveraging web analytics for decision making to how to scale efforts and many topics in between.  Following is a summary of each presenter’s top points:

Alex Bennert – Chief Search Strategist at The Wall Street Journal

Alex spoke on the important of using data to make decisions, including leveraging sources such as Google webmaster tools.  The information provided in webmaster tools has grown significantly since they have implemented it.

There are currently 29.6 million small businesses in the U.S. (SCORE). 63% of consumers and small business owners use the Internet to find information about local companies and 82% use search engines (Webvisible & Nielsen).  That means there’s a lot of opportunity for local SEO.

Recently I attended GetListed.org’s Local University in Minneapolis which focused on how to optimize web sites for local search.  Out of all the good information that came out of the event, here are 10 easy things you can do today to optimize sites and content to attract local customers.

1. Claim your profile.
It’s as simple as logging into Google Places, Bing Local and Yahoo Local and walking through the verification steps which include a phone call or post card to verify your address.

Online Marketing Blog has been toying around with a new blog header and thought it would be best to get your opinion on which design we should choose.

In the upper left corner of this post there are 5 different headers to check out, each with it’s own name. Click on each one and the header will change – see what you think.

Once you decide which one you like best, please vote below!

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We’ll let voting run until Friday this week and then we’ll update the blog design with the most popular header. All thanks to you

With more businesses realizing the power of digital channels to nurture relationships, rally fans and build customer affinity, opportunity abounds for savvy professionals.

But with execution all over the board how should those who are new get started?

To answer that question, we posted thoughts from a variety of marketing and web professionals on social media strategy before tactics.

It’s an ongoing debate, but the consensus among the marketing and PR crowd is clear:  strategy before tactics is the logical approach for businesses to take when engaging in social media.

Sarah Evans provides a clever analogy: