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:

Most marketers understand the importance of setting goals, understanding audience and making a plan for improving their search engine visibility. But despite the need for that strategic approach, online marketers are hungry for individual tips and best practices. At TopRank Online Marketing, we understand the need for both and cover the strategy in-depth at Online Marketing Blog.

For tips that you can use right now, here are 7 suggestions that will help you align your content with SEO best practices and help raise your visibility where customers are looking:

1. Avoid overuse of pronouns like “it”, “they” and “them” in favor of more descriptive keyword phrases where Google is looking for them in page titles, file names, text links between pages, image alt text and in body copy.
2. Facts tell, stories sell: Figure out why customers buy and create keyword optimized content that tells stories about how and why your products solve customer problems.

Chicago is known for many things including the arts and being the home of the most well known mob boss of all time. This November we are excited to attend  SES Chicago with guns a’ blazing. This conference is flush with everything from expert advice on PPC, keyword research, SEO, social media, local marketing, mobile marketing, link building, content, optimization, usability, and so much more. With over 70 sessions at November’s conference there is a plethora of information for online marketers eager to learn more about present and future trends in the industry.

This year TopRank CEO Lee Odden will be moderating a session on “SEO Competitive Analysis” and will be speaking at two sessions on “The Convergence of Search, Social, and Content Marketing” as well as “Content Marketing Optimization.”  Here’s the lineup!

Wednesday, November 16
11:15am-12:15pm – The Convergence of Search, Social, and Content Marketing

If you’re an internet marketing professional looking for the latest in industry trends, practical tools, and tips for executing on your own PPC or SEO strategy, then ad:tech New York is an event that you should not miss.  We are pleased to announce that TopRank CEO Lee Odden will be following in the footsteps of Melanie Mitchell, SVP of Search at Digitas, and serving as the Marketing Master for three sessions at the next ad:tech conference.

When asked about serving as a Marketing Master at Ad:Tech New York, Odden had this to say: “It is an honor to be selected to program the Search Marketing track at such an important conference as ad:tech.  We are privileged to have a great team of presenters from some of the top brand marketers around including Intel, REI, Volkswagen and Salesforce.com.  Attendees will gain practical insight about integrated Paid Search as well as SEO that they can put in practice the same day.”

The culmination of a deal signed just over a year ago is that Microsoft’s Bing now powers Yahoo! search. The actual search impact remains to be seen, but it’s worth noting that the two search engines together (Yahoo! and Bing) account for only about 30% of U.S. searches – with Google at 65%.

The real SEO news is that Bing is launching its brand-new Adaptive Search. This is a tool by means of which Microsoft will attempt to adjust its algorithm to take into account the contextual relationship of a user’s search history.  Microsoft’s Aidan Cook explains the Bing Adaptive Search this way: “Every time you search on Bing, the information provided helps Bing understand what you’re trying to do. The more you search, the more Bing can learn – and use that information to adapt the experience so you can spend less time searching and accomplish what you set out to do.”

MarketingProfs University

In an ever-evolving age of interactive media, search marketers walk a tight rope.  Between paid and organic search, social media, optimization, search rankings and measuring success, it’s no surprise that this balancing act presents challenges.

MarketingProfs University is offering a 13-class course addressing popular questions on these topics to help search marketers find the perfect balance and be more effective in their careers.

Event details:
MarketingProfs University Search Marketing School
Modern SEO Strategy: Adapt or Die
Monday, Sept. 19, 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
Register and attend online classes live or access recordings

MarketingProfs University provides affordable, comprehensive online training across the disciplines that make up every business’ marketing mix. In addition to learning what businesses need to plan, build and measure successful marketing programs, course attendees have the opportunity to review best practices from peers, discover new tools and processes, and see what’s working in marketing today.  Search Marketing School is a live online presentation featuring several speakers throughout the day.

Search Engine Optimization as an online marketing discipline has been in effect for over 10 years and at the speed the internet changes, that’s multiple lifetimes of change.  The ad:tech conference in San Francisco this week is featuring a series of Marketing Masters sessions, one of which is focused on modern search engine optimization.  What are current best practices and where does SEO fit in today’s social media world?  These questions and more will be answered Tuesday 4/11 by a super panel of SEO experts including TopRank Online Marketing CEO, Lee Odden.

Here’s the official session description:

A common misperception in regards to a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program is that its value is derived solely from traffic generated from Google.  Traffic from smaller search engines, such as Yahoo! and Bing, holds so little value that it may as well not exist.

Just as no upstanding SEO professional would ever state that Yahoo! and Bing traffic is the primary objective of an SEO program, no upstanding SEO professional would ever state that Google traffic is the only objective of an SEO program.

In reality, traffic from all sources can bring measurable SEO value.

For instance, by setting up Analytics goal tracking, we may learn that traffic from Yahoo! or Bing may be only 10% of that which is generated by Google, but visitors convert into sale or inquiry at four times the rate.  In regards to traffic from Bing, this scenario may not be as far-fetched as it first appears, as Adam Audette from SearchEngineWatch astutely points that ignoring Bing equates to ignoring a heavily e-commerce-focused demographic.

By design, software and technology companies exist to solve long-held problems in new and innovative ways.  And because technology can be so readily customized, by factors ranging from vertical industry focus to specific problems addressed, no two software or technology companies will ever be the same.

In much the same way, no two successful search marketing programs will ever be exactly alike.  Each program will need to customized based on factors ranging from the type of prospects being targeted to specific objectives being achieved.

The three companies below, each having developed a unique software or technology offering, recently launched customized search marketing programs with TopRank® Online Marketing:

Aprigo offers business-savvy IT managers solutions that enable easier management and tighter security of business data existing in the cloud.  TopRank’s engagement with Aprigo, rooted in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), will be designed to increase qualified online inquiries.