Online Marketing Blog

Search Marketing is well documented as one of the most effective marketing strategies a business can employ regardless of the economic environment. Now more then ever companies recognize search as an essential element to their businesses bottom line and are seeking out the help of professional SEO firms.

Finding the right search marketing agency is no doubt a daunting task. But what happens once you’ve done your due diligence and chosen an SEO firm that best suits your style and philosophy?

Below are 5 ways to ensure you’re getting the best return on your search marketing dollars from your SEO invrestment:

Day 1 of the Search Engine Strategies Expo in San Jose got off to a really fruitful start with Danny Sullivan giving us a lottery tip. His session, Introduction to Search Marketing, gave us good examples on how to buy tickets and win big in the search engine lottery.

Emphasizing the importance of title tags, meta tags, meta keywords, Danny explains many ways to optimize a site to be found more easily by all visitors, human or otherwise. He discussed how to research the best keywords to place in the content for your site, stating that if you don’t have enough time to do a huge amount of keyword research, “go with your gut”. You know your users. You know your site. What would you search for to get to your site?

In an interview I did yesterday with the Minneapolis Star Tribune one of the things we talked about was how common it is for search engine optimization engagements to reveal many other marketing and process consulting needs. For example, one of the most common issues we run into is a lack of sales pipeline management.

Many companies do not yet have a firm grasp of their online lead generation to sales revenue, especially BtoB clients with long sales cycles and where many people might interact with a prospect before they become a client.

Today I’m doing an online radio interview over at RSS Ray on social media and search engine optimization. Our discussion will cover fundamentals of social media and how businesses, small and large, might use such tactics as part of their online marketing mix. We’ll also discuss blog marketing and press release optimization.

The kind of social media optimization and marketing that gets the most play these days is hitting the home page of digg or getting tons of traffic from Stumbleupon, del.icio.us, reddit, etc. Many of the SMO/SMM campaigns we run achieve these kinds of results, but it’s not the end goal. If you’re familiar with the services we provide at TopRank, you’ll know we take a holistic approach to search marketing and view things like social media on a longer term basis.

Ask.com has announced this morning the launch of an upgraded version of Ask Sponsored Listings with improvements based on advertiser feedback and a new API to allow search marketers to create customized tools.
Here are some of the new features:

• Daily Budgeting
• Variable Refill Amount
• Hourly Billable Data
• Bulk Upload Enhancements
• Dashboard Reports

Looks like Ask is stepping up in the world and with 66% year over year growth in searches (2005 to 2006) according to Nielsen/Netratings, there’s a lot more overall search market share left to take from MSN and AOL.