Blog

Google doesn’t usually pre-announce big changes to their services, especially regarding their search algorithm, however Matt Cutts during SXSW gave us a heads up on some changes.

There are a few things to note, and none of them are overly surprising:

• Google will continue to, and will soon place even more emphasis on quality content
• Aggressively overly optimized pages will be affected

Read the following quote, which Matt Cutts gave during his SXSW interview:

What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.

(Quote and recording courtesy Search Engine Roundtable)

This has caused mumbling and grumbling in the SEO world, and business world, with mainstream media like Wall Street Journal covering the Google changes.

But to get a decent look at what some of the top thought leaders in the SEO industry are thinking about this, head over to a comment thread at Inbound.org on a submission of the article that has Matt’s SXSW interview in it.

A couple of highlights of the comments:

Tad Chef: We all need keyword density checkers again, to find out whether our keyword density is too high.

Dr. Peter J. Meyers: Seriously, can’t believe this fell under the radar. Little coverage of “Venice”, too. Are these monthly algo announcements by Google making us all lazy (except Barry)?

Ross Hudgens: Haven’t they always been hammering over-optimization? Maybe they’re turning it up a notch. But definitely will be checking the density and internal anchor text.

Willy Franzen: From the language he used, it sounds like they’re going to algorithmically penalize sites for over-optimization instead of taking away the benefits of over-optimziation. That seems odd to me. Why not just make those practices less effective? If spammy stuff didn’t work, there wouldn’t be a need to “level the playing field.”

Key Takeaway

I think that the key takeaway here is that if you are using less than favorable methods to optimize your content and pages than shake in your boots because Google is about to slap you a little more, post-Panda.

If you are focusing on truly quality content, however Google and Matt define it (would be great to hear some insight into this by the way), and certainly optimizing (would be dumb not to do it at all) but making it relevant and logical keeping in best practice, don’t stress it so bad. Just don’t let it fly under your radar. Stay on top of it.

Your website exists so that your prospective customers can gather information about your business, learn more about your products and services, and, if they are ready, to contact you! Don’t make it any harder to convert a lead than it needs to be. Here are three reasons why you must have a contact form on your website.

1. Email links don’t always work

If you have just a plain text email link such as, ‘Email us at jdoe@example.com‘, the link doesn’t always work!

For those that use web-based email, clicking an email link will most of the time try to open the default email client program on their computer. On Windows this would be Outlook or Windows Live Mail, on a Mac it could be Apple Mail.

Imagine the frustration of the individual when the program window pops up and they have to hit cancel! Then they must copy the email address and paste it. This might seem trivial but could be just enough to turn someone away.

Another issue could be if for some reason the individual is unable to access their email at the time, if a network is blocking access to web mail, or they are on a mobile device and don’t want to open email, filling out a form is a quick and effortless way to get in touch.

2. Missed opportunities – conversion rate improvement

When someone wants to contact you, they typically would like the experience to be as simple as possible. Why else were contact forms invented? It’s a simple way to open the door for a potential contact to fill out a form and hit the send button and wait for a response.

But there’s even more! With a contact form, after someone fills it out and hits the button, you have an opportunity to convert them to other possible options. In a best case scenario after they hit the send button on the form, they are instantly redirected to a new web page that thanks them for the interest and contact and then gives them a few other potential opportunities such as to check out other resources on your website that they might not have known about.

Example: Thank you for contacting us! We will get back in touch soon, in the meantime, you might want to check out our XYZ Product Blog for tips and tricks about our industry.

It doesn’t have to be anything overly complicated, but it’s a form of nurturing your lead just a tad bit more.

3. Building better relationships and tying into sales process

Just having the forms and putting into best practice the locations and fields is one important step, but there are other benefits to these.

When you use an integrated lead generation system, such as tying the form into a CRM (customer relationship management system) like Salesforce or HubSpot CRM and the list goes on, you are able to get greater lead intelligence but also to make the sales process smoother for a sales representative and ultimately improve the customer experience for the prospect!

If you have an email going directly to an individual and they are on vacation and the ball gets dropped and the person isn’t contacted in a timely manner, bye bye new business!

When the sales team is tipped off that a new lead came in, wala! Magic can happen and the rest is history.

Contact (Lead) Form Best Practices

Now that you know the three reasons you must have contact forms, better yet, call them lead forms, here are a few best practices.

Only include the absolute minimum fields (boxes) necessary

No one likes to fill out a lengthy form, unless there is good reason. Only ask for information that is necessary. To begin, you may need Name, Email, Phone, and a comment or question. When appropriate you could ask for more, but only when it’s appropriate.

Don’t JUST have a form on the Contact Us page

 The golden opportunity with a lead form is that when its placed in front of a truly compelling offer such as a free download of a white paper, guide, tip sheet, etc., the value to the requester is they get some high quality information and express interest, while you and your sales team gets a much warmer lead than any of your direct mailings could even wish to hold a candle to.

Test your forms to make sure they work!

I have seen it happen many times; a website owner hears from someone they have tried many times to contact them through the website on a form and no one ever got the message. Forms, while a great marketing and sales tool, also increase the complexity technologically, so make sure that you test them at least once a month to make sure they are chugging along doing their job!

Question: What successes or wins have you seen with contact lead forms?

Keenpath founder and President, Mark Mathson, has joined FullQuota, a business-to-business (b2b) marketing, lead generation, and inside sales outsourcing company.

Keenpath, inbound marketing agency, is in the process of transitioning client accounts to partners and will continue servicing some existing clients until the end of this year.

“I am excited about the opportunity to join the talented FullQuota team and to grow personally, professionally, and technically; while at the same time allowing me to bring to the table what can help with the company’s mission and objectives, and clients,” said Mark Mathson.

With enterprise inbound marketing the importance of understanding who your clients are, what words they use when they speak about their needs and interests and to understand how not to irritate or annoy them in the communication process.

Because enterprise inbound marketing is dependent on high-quality verbal, visual or text communications, this is essential in today’s market.

The concept of blogging to interest potential clients has everything to do with touching a person at a deep personal level. Before when sales representatives received training– trainers would say “relationships, relationships, relationships.”

This is still true, yet today we have vastly differing tastes, cultures, and markets online.  It’s even more important to understand the connection to interests, needs, and emotional responses.

When people are online searching for something important to them, how do you discover what word combinations will pull them into your site? How do you keep them coming back? Human nature tells us it matters not what country they come from, or what language they speak, if an emotional connection can be made you can have a chance at establishing loyalty and camaraderie with that person.

This is the reason social networking has become such a phenomenon. This is the secret to finding and keeping connections with clients and potential repeat buyers. One way to verify this is simply watching the political campaigns in any country. Emotional and physical need is the product. Change for the better is the driver. The candidate who impresses the masses most wins. He who’s got loyalty of the crowds gets money in their pockets.

Building The Connections

With enterprise inbound marketing the world is looking for you. You as the provider of the emotional or physical need have the job of discovering what will hold and return that seeker to your site to get that need met. Really smart company managers put teams of competent communicators onto LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and other social connection sites to connect with clients around the need for what you offer. You know – making friends, personal connections. Finding sweet-spots and working with those needs/wants for potential buyers.

If your online sales team working social networking sites has the power to make deals and negotiate prices while having conversations in the field, their sales will soar through this personal contact. Plus, those workers will find the exact tone, site, and spot where clients and customers talk about what they need. This hands them the words and phrases customers are already using.

Content, connection, meeting emotional and physical need. This is the only way it has ever been done successfully when supporting integrity for the customer.

How close are you to clients today? How well does your company track repeat buyers and how well do you survey or do outreach to identify what keeps the repeat customers coming back? This is the answer to the dilemma. Loyalty through friendship. You know – relationships, relationships, relationships.

(photo credit: Gary Cope)

Many business owners find it difficult to come up with a highly specific marketing strategy that fills a specific niche. Niche marketing, however, is much more effective for the needs of your business, especially if you focus on online marketing.

The Internet provides one great advantage – a target audience. Only people holding specific interest in a topic will pay attention to your message. Discovering the right marketing niche is the best way to make sure that the right audience for your business message is approached.

Do you know how to find out the best business marketing niche?

Finding Your Inbound Marketing Niche

You probably have various products and services for sale. Niche marketing focuses on one of them or a specific group of products. Niche marketing allows you to occupy a smaller sub-sector within a larger segment. Discovering the right niche will help you beat competition and position yourself better in the respective market.

It may seem like a difficult task but discovering the best business marketing niche is a relatively simple task.

Simple website analysis will help you determine the right business marketing niche for your promotional needs. Which are the pages that attract the biggest number of visits? What is the product or service that website visitors spend the longest time looking at?

The behavior of potential customers is the first type of indication you need to use when choosing a niche for corporate promotional purposes. Website visitors will let you know what interests them and what they will be willing to purchase.

Go for a business marketing niche that features limited competition. It will be difficult to achieve popularity in a niche that already benefits from the presence of several important players.

A simple online search will let you know which niches generate the most intense competition. You will then need to start looking for the niches that only feature several websites competing against each other. This is the business marketing niche that you should be making use of.

Competition research plays an important role in your marketing strategy. Knowing what others are doing and how to dominate the sector is of vital importance for the success of a business marketing niche campaign.

Selecting the right niche for your online promotional efforts is a smart way to quickly establish your positions and to increase your website traffic. Higher traffic will naturally mean more potential sales. Take the time and know how to choose the correct marketing sector. A good strategy is a guarantee of success in the intense and dynamic online business world.

(image credit: Fieldstone Alliance)

When the holidays roll around, most professional business owners know that business is going to slow down. However, that doesn’t have to be the case, and the holidays can be the perfect time to start turning prospects into customers. In this article we look at how you can use inbound marketing for your holiday business marketing efforts, to increase sales now, and in future.

Create a Holiday Discount

One fantastic way to leverage your inbound marketing plan for holiday business marketing is to create a seasonal holiday discount or special offer. If you already have an email marketing list thanks to your inbound marketing activities, you can send that offer out to your list. If you don’t, you can integrate the offer in your other marketing activities.

Create a Free Gift

The holidays are the time for giving, right? So why not incorporate that in your inbound marketing plan, and your holiday business marketing plan.

Create a free report, eBook, or trial offer that you incorporate into your marketing. It’ll ensure that you’re growing your list over the holidays, and it’ll keep your existing clients and prospects happy. There’s nothing people like more than a gift, so give your clients one – you’ll be glad you did!

Let People Know You’re Working

One of the reasons businesses tend to slow down over the holidays is that most people just assume that you won’t be working. If you aren’t, that’s fine, but if you are, you could find that being available when your competitors aren’t is a fantastic way to gain new customers!

Use your existing inbound marketing channels to create awareness that you’ll be available over the holidays, and you might be surprised at how many people get hold of you!

Automate

Even if you’re not working over the holidays, which doesn’t mean that your inbound marketing plan will stop working, just because you do.

If you don’t already have one working for you, now is the time to get an autoresponder, and write a series of holiday messages for the people who do respond to your inbound marketing strategies. That way, even if you’re not working, your holiday business marketing will be – working hard to build relationships with prospects!

Never Too Late

Even if you’ve never considered inbound marketing as a viable strategy, you should remember that it’s never too late to start. You still have time to incorporate inbound marketing into your holiday business marketing plan, and to make sure that even while you’re taking time off, your marketing network is working for you.

Start today, and you should find that while you’re enjoying some time off, your inbound marketing plan is hard at work, capturing leads and prospects, and that when you get back, you have a long list of people who are just waiting to buy from you.

(photo credit: Jeremy)

There are few things that keep business owners awake at night more than their sales results. Over time, however, the cost of sales becomes as much of a factor as the turnover their businesses are doing, and they start looking for ways to reduce their sales costs, while maintaining or growing their sales figures.

One of the best ways to do that is to use inbound marketing sales as a core factor in their sales and marketing plan, but let’s look at that in more detail.

Quick and Easy to Set Up

Finding a great sales representative can take time – months of reading resumes, interviewing candidates, and making offers might, if you are lucky, result in a rock star sales representative for your team.

Inbound marketing sales, however, are driven by the internet, and by technologies and platforms that already exist – from your website to article directories and more.

That means that unlike hiring a rock star sales professional, creating, and implementing an inbound marketing sales campaign can take a matter of days or weeks, and because it’s cumulative, it allows you to build on what you’ve already done, for months and years after the initial setup.

Never Takes a Day Off

Because your inbound marketing sales plan will use technology, rather than human beings, to work its sales magic, there’s never a day (or a minute of any day for that matter) that it’s not working for you.

It’s like having a vast sales network that never sleeps, never takes lunch, and never gets poached by your competitors working for you, and the best part is that the network costs a fraction of what it would to hire a sales team that achieved the same results!

Sell to People Who Want to Buy from You

The best inbound marketing sales plans are based on strategies like long tail keywords, list building and other clever technological tricks, that firstly allow you to market to people who already want what you’re selling and secondly allows you to build a relationship with the people who do connect with you.

It’s like casting your net on a part of a lake that has guaranteed great fishing every time, rather than angling in an area that no fish ever visits!

Low Cost, High Impact

The truth is inbound marketing takes a little time, effort, and money to set up correctly. Once it is set up though, you’ll find that your cost of sales drops through the floor, and that potential clients find you – rather than you having to look for them.

It’s the marketing plan of the future, and it’s one that makes it possible to find new customers in your area (or around the world) quickly, easily, and cheaply. There are strategies that allow you to capture prospects details voluntarily, and most good inbound marketing plans rely heavily on automating sales, which leaves you more time to focus on your business, and less time worrying about sales!

(photo credit: Tom Magliery)

If you thought inbound marketing was only for businesses looking to use the internet and other technologies to grow their global footprint, think again. Local inbound marketing, or local SEO, focuses on the geographical areas you operate in, and it’s a great way to find people or businesses in your area who are already looking for your products and services.

What Is Local Inbound Marketing?

Local inbound marketing uses the same principles as any inbound marketing, SEO or SEM strategy, but it adds a geographical element to the techniques. It helps to ensure that real world businesses get traffic and leads from people in the areas they operate in, who may buy from them. It’s a method of narrowing the funnel that inbound marketing creates even further, so that you’re focused on your exact target market. But how do you do that? There are several tried and tested strategies.

• Local site directories. These are internet directories that are geographically limited by country, state, or province. They’re a great way to get links from locally focused sites, which not only increases your inbound marketing overall, but also your local presence.
• Google Places is another must for companies or individuals who are focused on local inbound marketing. It’s a cheap, easy, and guaranteed way of ensuring that a brick-and-mortar business finds the customers they want, int he areas they want them.
• Adding geographical references to your keywords and phrases for SEO and SEM is another great local marketing idea. So instead of using words that are only related to what you do, use words that are related to where you are too!
• Local article directories are another great way to funnel people in your area to your page. They work exactly like the bigger article directories, but they’re limited geographically.

In a nutshell, local inbound marketing strategies use all the same principles, to achieve the same goal (getting people who already want what you’re selling to your site), but they add a geographical reference to all of those methods.

It’s a quick, easy, cost effective way to use inbound marketing strategies for businesses who have a limited geographical footprint, and like any other type of inbound marketing, it’s one of the most cost effective strategies out there.