TopRank Internet Marketing News

Sometimes, online marketing campaigns are dazzling, magnificent in scope and incredibly complicated. Thankfully, there are also great gains to be made by getting back to basics and ensuring best practices are followed across your site and web presence.

A company website is a living, breathing representation of the brand on the web. Over a site’s lifetime, content is added and taken away. Copy changes. Pages may be redirected. Landing pages come and go. Menus and navigation change.

Each of these changes over the site’s life (hopefully) served its purpose and helped the site become more productive for the company and helpful for customers. However, it can also leave the site disjointed, riddled with errors, and underperforming.

An important first step in launching an online marketing campaign is identifying objectives.  Your objectives will help lead your strategy, implementation, measurement, and refinement.  For example, an ecommerce site may be looking to drive more traffic to their website.  Increased traffic will push more visitors into the top of the funnel, likely increasing the number of visits which convert to a sale.  However, as one company learned, marketing effects for an ecommerce site can impact your bottom line in more than one way.

Company Background:
Leather Bound is an online and in store retailer of leather motorcycle apparel and accessories. Leather Bound Online has been engaged with TopRank since 2010, with the objective of increasing traffic and online sales via their website, leatherboundonline.com.

Current Situation:
Leather Bound Online retained TopRank Online Marketing to strategize and implement a Search Engine Optimization and Content Marketing program which tactics include:

Online Marketing has evolved and taken on many forms over the past decade.  On average, 22% of marketing budgets are spent on Search Engine Marketing alone (Econsultancy).   The online marketplace is flush with consultants and providers that make big promises, but lose clients due to an inability to execute on those promises.

TopRank Online Marketing makes it our mission to deliver the results that we promise to our clients.  SEO agencies, corporate marketers and PR firms around the world use PRWeb as an essential tool in their mix of SEO and online marketing tactics.  As a testament to our expertise and longstanding relationship, PRWeb has chosen to work with TopRank Online Marketing to be it’s SEO agency.   We would also like to take this opportunity to share what has made the TopRank Online Marketing and  PRWeb’s SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing program successful.

Online marketing programs are oftentimes designed to focus squarely at the top of the sales funnel, in other words, to bring traffic directly to a client’s virtual front door.  But the best programs expand this focus deeper into the funnel, and concentrate just as much on compelling those already at the front door to come in and buy.  In the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and conversion optimization case study below, staffing software provider eEmpACT experiences the benefits of a marketing program dedicated to boosting results throughout the sales funnel.

Situation

Minnesota-based eEmpACT offers a staffing software solution with integrating front office functions such as resume management and back office functions such as payroll, to recruiters and staffing professionals.

As with any company that competes for B2B prospects, the number of sales eEmpACT realizes will always be smaller than the number of prospects it generates.  As such, ensuring both a brimming-over and easily navigated sales funnel is absolutely critical.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an online marketing tactic that helps search engines find, index and rank content on the web.   Proper SEO is not a silver bullet or a magic pill that will help a website skyrocket to the top of search rankings in 5 days or less.  When managed effectively, SEO is a tactic designed to produce results that are ongoing and cumulative – rather than dramatic and temporary. In the Search Engine Optimization case study below, flat panel and projector mount manufacturer Chief Manufacturing illustrates the ongoing success that can be achieved with a long term SEO program.

In a recent post to Online Marketing Blog, TopRank® Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden writes, “Focusing content creation efforts solely to serve Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes can be limiting. If the only purpose for creating content is for search engine visibility, the publishing web site may improve search traffic but disappoint when it comes to converting that traffic.”

In the blog marketing and content creation case study below, learn how the TopRank team leveraged this philosophy in the design and creation of a blog for audience response system provider IML. By keeping a bullseye-like focus on prospect and customer needs, TopRank has helped IML create an online resource that exists for the primary purpose of supporting overall business objectives.

Today’s 24-hour news cycle means, more than ever before, journalists and bloggers turn to search engines and social media to quickly find stories and sources.  Despite this, many media placement and article syndication companies guard content behind lengthy log-in processes.  The five minutes it takes a journalist to log-in is, oftentimes, five minutes spent finding a more convenient source.

One company that has evolved to meet the needs of its prospect and client base is NewsUSA.  The social media and Twitter case study below details how TopRank® Online Marketing is helping NewsUSA meet business objectives by freeing up and expanding the availability of media content into channels frequented by customers and prospects.

Situation:

For more than 20 years, NewsUSA has helped its clients achieve brand visibility via copyright-free syndicated content. Much like its competition, NewsUSA entered 2009 with a requirement that users, from print journalists to bloggers, log-in to its article syndication section in order to access and publish this copyright-free content.

Suitably sticky social news headlines, crafted to help content resonate and burn throughout social media channels, is both an art and a science.  In a recent post to Online Marketing Blog, picked up by CRM Mastery, TopRank® Online Marketing Account Manager Adam Singer offers several tips to help readers craft compelling social headlines.

Below, find how two of the five tips offered by Singer have helped boost everything from search engine rankings to social media exposure for TopRank Clients.

• Leverage formulas which work for others
  ’16 Must-Read B2B Marketing Strategy Ebooks’ by Marketo

Smashing Magazine has made page one of Digg hundreds of times using the headline formula ‘number + adjective + sticky message.’  Of course, this formula only works if the headline directs to content that is equally compelling to the audience.

Despite being an ever-expanding and constantly evolving industry, finding and securing a job in public relations (PR) remains a challenging endeavor. This fact was not lost on the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA).  As a service to public relations professionals, the PRSA enhanced the usability of its Jobcenter. Of course, before PR professionals could use the Jobcenter to find jobs, the Jobcenter itself had to be found by PR professionals.

The following search engine optimization case study illustrates how TopRank® Online Marketing helped secure targeted keyword rankings for the PRSA Jobcenter, leading to visitor referral increases exceeding 400%.

Situation:

With over 32,000 professional and student members, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) represents the world’s largest PR organization. One of the key resources the PRSA offers to its members is the PRSA Jobcenter, where over 77,000 potential employees are able to connect with a seemingly infinite number of PR professionals of all experience levels.

Many companies launch corporate blogs taking into account only what the blog should do for them, rather than what they should do for their blog.  This can lead to blog posts being published sporadically, without the support of a consistent messaging strategy or editorial calendar.  Ultimately, this makes it extremely difficult for the blog to support overall company objectives.

The following case study features a blog marketing tactic developed by TopRank® Online Marketing for B2B marketing software provider Marketo that helped guide blog messaging, increase blog keyword traffic and improve blog referrals to the company’s website.

Situation:

Marketo, a leader in B2B marketing automation software, helps marketing and sales teams drive revenue and improve marketing accountability through email marketing, lead nurturing and lead scoring capabilities.  Founded by B2B marketing experts, Marketo lives up to its reputation as a thought leader via regular posts to the company’s Modern B2B Marketing blog.  Marketo engaged TopRank® Online Marketing to develop a blog marketing strategy that would increase priority keyword referrals, build search engine traffic and increase company awareness. This tactical case study highlights one of the tactics in support of the overall content marketing strategy.