I was building out a contest for a potential customer to get an estimate of the cost and I got this error message:

Why This Decision Sucks

Wildfire’s promotions application was really what put the company on the map. It was a service that reachable value for millions of small businesses across the country. Now, it appears as if Google will take Wildfire the way of other major marketing conglomerates to develop a “full purpose platform” that will likely be out of reach for most small businesses.

I say this because their pricing page only shows a contact button under each of the different pricing plans.

While I respect the fact that Google is making an effort to go after the meat of the market and drive more profitable sales as a business, I am growing tired of great small business services getting swallowed up by major companies that make them virtually unreachable for start-ups and small businesses with limited funds.

Like the search algorithm updates that our video warned you about back in January – is another move to stifle the ability of smaller businesses from generating business online.

The post Wildfire Single Promotions to End on June 30, 2013 appeared first on eSpire Marketing.

Today’s Smart Reads for SMB’s

• Matt Cutt’s on how Google will handle Advertorials My Thoughts: Google seems to be opening the door for possible class action law suits for SMB’s that may be using these tactics. Not sure how they can keep track of it all.
• 3 Examples of Great Content Marketing in Competitive Verticals My Thoughts: These are great examples of some really creative ways to generate content that is very linkable to your website. Don’t just be average – be helpful and extraordinary in the ways that you create content for your site. If someone else has done it already – find a way to take it to another level.
• Great Marketing Often Misses the Mark on SEO My Thoughts: Try to think about SEO in everything you do because it will really benefit you in the long run for other marketing efforts. While this campaign was successful – eventually it will be forgotten and the link confusion can hurt long term effects.
• How to Choose Keywords that Sell My Thoughts: Choosing keywords is different from choosing keywords that sell products. Finding these gems will go a long way in helping you bottom line.
• 3 Quick Ways to Perk Up Your Email Marketing Efforts My Thoughts: Quick and easy – but also important. Take a look for yourself.

The post Smart Reads for SMB’s May 29, 2013 appeared first on eSpire Marketing.

How to Choose Keywords

Choosing keywords especially the right keywords will drastically effect the amount of traffic you receive & alter the conversion rates of your website as well. There are a number of factors to consider when deciding which keywords are right for your business. Follow these guidelines to figure out how to choose keywords, the right keywords, for your company that will lead to stronger leads and higher sales.

Keyword Relevancy

Keyword relevancy is important for any page. If the keywords you’re targeting on that page aren’t relevant to the topic of discussion on that page you will never rank well in the long term. In SEO we categorize keyword relevancy into three categories: Broad, short tail, and long tail keywords.

What’s the Difference?

Broad Keywords: Green

Broad keywords like the one in the example are relevant just lack any real targeting that differentiates your page from other pages on the web. A search query for the term “camera” has about 1,080,000,000 different “relevant” pages.

Trying to find your way to outrank competition in this space is going to be very difficult. Additionally people searching for this broad of a keyword are more than likely just looking for information and not to purchase an actual camera just yet.

Short Tail Keywords: Yellow

Short tail keywords are slightly more targeted. These offer a huge chunk of the actual search data. The above examples are just a few. The good thing about these is they generally offer a strong amount of monthly search traffic and they are more targeted towards users that are more ready to purchase your products on the day that they search. Adding in terms like “buy” or “for sale” can help to break these down even more towards purchasing.

The key terms in this part of the spectrum will range from highly competition to low competition. If you’re just starting out, focus on some of the lower competitive keywords in this field so that you have a higher chance of ranking faster. If your website has been around for awhile and you have decently strong SEO background, you may be able to rank well for the mid to high level competitive keywords.

Long Tail Keywords: Grey

Long tail keywords are keywords that are targeted to an exact product. They often have very little search data because there isn’t enough volume for them to track. The nice thing about these keywords is that if a user is searching for them – they are extremely likely to make a purchase.

The bad part about these keywords is that you’re only going to get one type of customer. You may miss out on the customer who isn’t exactly sure what they want to buy but know they’re in the market for some variation of the product that you sell.

Competitive SEO Factors

These are extremely important. One of the biggest mistakes that you can make is just looking at the search volume and not looking at yourself vs. the competition for your keywords. Sure, in theory it’d be great to rank number 1 for all of your search terms but in actuality it’s highly unlikely that you will do so. Especially when you’re just starting out.

We use the SEOmoz Search Toolbar which provides a SERP overlay for any given query. By using this tool you can see how strong your competition’s pages & urls are for competitive advantage (i.e. domain trust, links to the page, etc). This information is invaluable in determining where you can compete quickly.

Of course this information is less helpful if you don’t have something to compare it to. Our Competitive SEO Audit will give you the data you need to know where you stand as a company from an SEO standpoint and where your top competitors stand. You can then take this information to help you choose where to compete for keywords.

Click Through Rates & SERPs

A lot of SEO companies tout the guarantee to get you on page one of Google. They do this to make your feel like you’re getting something of actual value when in actuality you’re getting pretty much an empty promise. To loosely quote Tommy Boy, “Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I’ve got spare time. But for now, for your business’s sake, for your daughter’s sake, ya might wanna think about buying quality SEO from me.”

Focus on the top three listing. This is where the majority of the clicks (around 60%) come from in the organic listings. The percentages taper off drastically after number 3. If you find yourself competing with Amazon, Ebay, Wikipedia, or some other huge website in those top three listings – your best bet is to focus on another keyword until you can boost your search engine profile about.

Okay I’ve got my Keywords What’s next?

First step is to optimize your pages for you new keywords. Our article on Basic-On Page Optimization should help you get started with that.

The next step is the off-page SEO factors such as link building, public relations, and social media marketing. This is the toughest part of SEO as it takes actual hard work to increase your search profile.

Want SEO Help?

If you’ve got questions you’re always free to tweet me or The 5 Keys to Targeted SEO Traffic
How Much Are Your Keywords Worth?
Small Business SEO Blog

You will need to enter an email address to download the free resources BUT I promise to provide actual value with each email and I don’t remember ever sending out a pure sales pitch (just not my style).

P.S. we also offer SEO Coaching for companies who wish to learn at their own pace and take the reigns when they are ready. If you are interested in this service please email me directly

The post How to Choose Keywords That Sell appeared first on eSpire Marketing.

Google Now SEO

Google Now is a service that Google offers that send the most important information to your mobile device when you want it. This information includes weather, traffic information, public transportation info, and & local business attractions near you. I’ve been playing around with the app for a bit and the first thing I wanted to understand was how to SEO Google Now.

Essentially Google Now takes your location to give you this information, it appears that it also uses time information to change the results. For instance: the app normally shows traffic information or local weather as the top result. The other day however (around dinner time) the top listing showed which restaurants were close to me. After I got over how creepy that was – I settled in to think about the marketing power of this and how to harness it for small businesses.

Google Now pulls data from Google apps like Google Maps. Each of the local attractions that were showed to me weren’t necessarily super close to the location that I was in (Suburban Atlanta). However, each listing did have high quality scores in Google Maps, a lot of user reviews, and Google Plus shares.

Why is This important

Google Now, along with Google search is now the most robust searching system on mobile devices. It has siri like voice search, the majority of mobile searches for information happen through Google, and Google is shifting it’s newest search rankings towards companies that have invested time in creating strong Google applications profiles.

For brick and mortar stores not investing in this new technology you’re going to miss out on a huge portion of foot traffic that came from search before IF you don’t invest the time in Google applications.

Let’s use a restaurant as an example. The strongest restaurants in an area are generally going to be able to keep the same foot traffic from those customers who have heard of them before. If you’re not working towards getting Google reviews, shares, and optimizing your Google Maps pages with top quality content – you’re going to stand almost zero chance of capitalizing on this type of traffic.

How To Optimize For Google Now

If you’re a business and haven’t optimized your Google Maps or Google Local pages on Google Plus you’re going to get hit hard. You need to take the time to fill out all of the information that you can in order to give potential searchers all the information they would, on those pages, in an instant.

If you don’t have a Google Plus Page – you need to get one now. Make sure to fill out all of the important information that is necessary. Don’t half @$$ it – seriously. You’re just going to waste your time and not see any results.

You need to encourage people to go on Google and review your company and give your company’s page a +1 on Google+. With more Americans leaving Facebook and Google completely monopolizing the search game – it’s impossible for you to ignore it if you want to have a solid foundation for your company in SEO.

Do You Need help?

If you need help with optimizing your Google Apps pages or SEO in general we’d love to be able to help you. SEO is pretty confusing for a lot of companies and we specialize in driving strategic traffic to websites through SEO. If we can help or if you have any questions please feel free to contact us, tweet me if you’d like, or get started by downloading one of our free SEO resources over on the sidebar.

The post How Google Now Will Affect Search appeared first on eSpire Marketing.

There are many aspects involved in small business internet marketing, but some of the most significant and most cost-effective steps in getting started with a properly designed website include:

• Goal of the Website

Obviously the main goal of your business website is to drive more business, but you must begin with more defined smaller goals. The first goal might be to increase the number of phone calls and then branch out from there to achieve the ultimate main goal. In addition to having well defined goals, there must also be a system in place to measure the effectiveness of these goals.

• Website Content

The major search engines, like Google, look for websites that contain content that is relevant to the theme of the site and is updated on a regular basis. Stale content can be the death of any website or blog. A critical part of effective content is proper use of keywords. You’ll never be successful if your keywords don’t attract the right searchers. You must be very careful to not overuse keywords, which can be considered spam by the search engines. It is a good idea to use your keywords in the title of the web page and only a smattering of keyword use in the main text of the page. With the way search engines look at web pages today, more is not better when it comes to keywords. There are some very important questions to ask about your web content — Is the content unique and useful? Will visitors learn anything when they visit your site? Does the content match the goals of your business?

• Submitting to Search Engines is Free

The web crawlers or “bots” used by search engines are constantly crawling the internet and will automatically find your website if you do absolutely nothing. Keep in mind that there are not 4,000 search engines, so when you get an offer to submit your website to an incredible number of search engines, run as fast as you can. You can speed up the process of getting listed a little faster by using many of the free submission services available online. You can also set up a Google account and submit the sitemaps for your site yourself.

• Take Advantage of Free Advertising

There are many great business directories on the internet that are completely free. It takes a little time to add your business website to these directories, but the boost in website visitors and hopefully more sales is worth the effort. It is not a good idea to pay to be listed in any business directory, unless you have a very good reason. Some good free business directories include: InfoUSA, Local.com, YellowPages.com, Localeze, Google Local Business Center, Yelp and many others. Another good source for free advertising is social media, like Facebook. A business page on Facebook can be very effective in showcasing your products and services and also linking to your business website. Facebook also allows a means of communicating with current or potential customers. It is critical that all customers be provided with a proper business-like response to any questions presented on your Facebook page.

• Keep Track of Competition

Do searches for keywords related to your business and find out what the competition is doing and saying. This process can provide valuable ideas and will allow you to take stock of your own internet marketing efforts.

Espire Marketing, LLC is dedicated specifically to small business marketing, development, and consultation online. Our goal is to bring knowledge and understanding to other small businesses about Internet Marketing. Espire Marketing is happy to offer full service Internet marketing and development services to small businesses across the country. Please feel free to contact us today so together we can determine which of our services will best suit the marketing needs of your business.

The post Small Business Internet Marketing – Website Basics appeared first on eSpire Marketing.

Optimizing Page Titles

Page titles are the one of the first data points that Google captures when a spider is crawling your website. Each page on your website should have a unique page title that gives a headline explanation of what the page’s content is about. See the picture below:

The red arrow points to the page title of that blog article. It quickly explains what the article is about in a headline. You’ll want to do this for all of your pages & blog articles. Each time you optimize your page titles you’ll want to target a different keyword for that specific page (without being misleading). Something to consider when optimizing a specific pages title would be the different variations of your key terms for that page.

For instance, your target keyword may be searched more often in its plural form or singular form. Depending on the page’s authority this can make a difference in how well it ranks for a specific search query. As a general rule of thumb – don’t try to trick the search engines. Google has entire teams of engineers who already know the tricks people try and in some cases they will actively penalize a website that is misleading. Try not to have page titles that are over 70 characters in length as Google can only display up to 70 characters and having a … at the end of your page title can hurt your click through rate.

Optimizing Page Descriptions

Page descriptions are the little snippets of text that you see when you make a search query that is displayed directly under the pages title. See the picture below for examples.

As you can see each of the top two results have proper titles for the search query. The top listing has an optimized description while the second listing seems to have had more characters involved in its description than can be displayed by Google (150-160). After taking a deeper look the top listing also has a stronger domain authority and page authority than the 2nd listing. But proper optimization of the description could have a greater effect on the search results if in a situation where the domain & page authorities are similar.

In order to optimize your page descriptions you’ll want to write keyword rich & descriptive meta descriptions. These should have your keywords in them but should read naturally. For instance you wouldn’t want to write a description for Bacon recipes that says “Bacon is part of a bacon recipe because bacon recipes are delicious. Eat more bacon recipes and bacon recipes are good.” — See how confusing that reads? It makes not sense and ultimately if you write a description that doesn’t appear natural you’re going to get dinged by Google.

Optimizing H1 Tags

H1 tags are the next thing you should optimize on your page. These are essentially secondary titles that tells Google’s bots what the page is most likely about. A quick look at a screen shot of some scary looking HTML and you’ll see that the top listing has optimized this page for “Bacon” a main keyword in the search query for “Bacon Recipes”.

A common error that you’ll see in not properly optimized websites is the neglect of h1 tag optimization.

Optimizing On Page Content

A great way to optimize your on page content is to first off use the keyword you’d like to optimize for throughout your page. If you can fit it in the first 160 characters that is even better but there are some shifts in thinking about that based on Google’s decision to generate it’s own snippets.

Additional ways to optimize for specific keywords are to bold them on the page, italicize them, underline them, etc. Don’t overuse this tactic though. Again – Google is much smarter than you or I at catching these tactics. If over used they may consider your page spammy and therefore it will never rank well and you may even lose out on your total rankings.

Optimizing Images

This is a tactic that is often overlooked but I have seen great success in using this. You want to optimize any images on a page by optimizing the image’s titles and alt tags here’s the difference. Again – please don’t try to outsmart Google and overstuff these images with keywords. They should explain what the image is in the title and then the alt text should explain a little more in depth how the image is used in context to the page’s contents.

Optimizing URL Structure

Okay so this one is a big one but it’s not always the easiest fix. You want to have a URL structure that utilizes the target keywords for that page in it. If you’ve not done this already and your website is old I suggest you read this article on should I optimize my url structure.

There are a lot of trains of thought as to how to optimize url structures. Also, if a page with a certain url structure has already acquired a lot of links – it may be a poor idea from an SEO standpoint to change the url altogether. Read for yourself and proceed with caution.

Summary

I hoped to bring a basic guide to on page optimization with this article. I hope it’s found you well and that you were able to learn a bit more. These things can be a bit overwhelming because if you’re not involved with it on a daily basis it just seems daunting. If you have any questions please feel free to Tweet me. If you’re not sure if your site needs on-page optimization or not then please consider our SEO Audit. It will give you a much better picture of where you stand in SEO and how best to outrank your competition.

The post Basic On-Page Search Optimization for Small Business appeared first on eSpire Marketing.

Google+ Hangouts, an online meeting tool, uses webcams to enable you to see and hear other participants. Communication with remote employees, clients, vendors, even customers can be expensive for many small businesses. Google+ Hangouts is like having video conferencing with recording capabilities. It makes a great addition to your small business internet marketing strategy.

Team Meetings for Multi-Location Small Businesses 

More and more organizations include teleworking as part of their daily routine. In fact, recent statistics indicate that teleworking increased 73% between 2005 and 2011.

When you have employees working remotely, you don’t have the time, money, and ability to visit different sites to hold meetings or gather employees together at a single location. Conference calls are okay but it can feel impersonal. Participants may become distracted or miss key information. Plus, a phone call is merely a conversation.

With Google+ Hangouts, you get screen sharing. Push a button to share a Web URL, a screenshot, or highlight the current meeting speaker.

Webinar or Press Conference to Promote Your Expertise

Want to establish yourself as a subject matter expert? You can do it by creating a webinar series to market your small business or by holding a Q&A with vendors or clients.

If you’ve ever considered creating a tool for teaching others about your area of expertise, but stayed away because of cost and technicality, Google+ Hangouts offers you the opportunity to experiment. It’s free, fast, and easy with the Google+ Hangouts plugin.

Invite up to 10 active participants (15 with Google+ premium), record and edit your session, and share it later with Google+ Hangouts on Air. 

Google+ Hangouts also allows you to share big news and provides an interactive record of the announcement. Then you can stream your broadcast from your website or YouTube channel.

Whether you want to build your brand with customers, create interest by sharing your expertise, or conduct your business with those outside your immediate area, Google+ Hangouts offers a useful tool for your small business.

We’re here to help you make your small business internet marketing strategy successful. We offer a full range of internet marketing services to small businesses across the country. Review our website orcontact us today for more information on how Espire Marketing can help you.

The post Google+ Hangouts for Your Small Business Internet Marketing Strategy appeared first on eSpire Marketing.

As a small business owner, why should you participate in the National Day of Civic Hacking?

• By participating you can promote your business and associate it with a civic-minded and cutting-edge venture. Even if you don’t have a strong tech background, you can get involved in other ways, including organizing or sponsoring block parties, “hackathons,” and other collaborative meetings in your city or town.  Given that journalists are among those participating, you can expect to get some good publicity.

• This event is an excellent opportunity to network with colleagues and collaborators, including other entrepreneurs, software coders and developers, IT folk, technical writers, artists and designers.  The potential for connection and growth is great.

• Participating in this event will also keep you informed about the latest trends in software and technology, including small business technology solutions that you can put to use in your own business.

• If you participate, you can forge new ties within your community and establish yourself more firmly within it.  A small business owner who reaches out to the community and gives back to it has a better reputation, is more energized, and is better able to enrich the lives of customers, who are more likely to become long-time fans and supporters.

To participate, visit HackforChange.org. For further advice on promoting and growing your small business, contact Espire Marketing.

The post Small business technology suggestion: Participate in the National Day of Civic Hacking appeared first on eSpire Marketing.

First, what exactly is content marketing?

• Content marketing is all marketing that involves the creation and sharing of content to attract and engage potential prospects and customers.

• If you post articles to your site, produce audio or video, create images, or use PDF reports in your marketing then you are using content marketing.

• Content is needed for SEO and is also used in social media.

This description comes to us from the “Content Marketing Survey Report 2013″ published by Lisa Parmley, Founder of BusinessBolts.com.

The survey included “small business owners, marketers or people actively working on starting a small business” — people like you. Throughout the report information is detailed and also contrasts the trends for businesses with revenues over $10,000/month compared to the respondents as a whole.

Ok, so chances are you’re already using a variety of content marketing avenues (as were 74% of survey participants), hopefully with SEO and social media as anchors of your online marketing strategy, as they help drive traffic, increase awareness of your company/brand, convert prospects into customers, and build customer loyalty.

When asked what benefits they were seeing from their content marketing, the 3 biggest benefits reported were:

• Increasing Traffic (77%)
• Improving Search Engine Rankings (71%)
• Growing Brand Awareness (70%)

Most respondents indicated that they do not yet outsource creation of their content, but would like to. But after asking how to obtain high search engine results, their next most-asked question was “Where can I find high quality writers/get reliable outsourcers?”

If you have similar questions or are interested in improving your content marketing efforts, take advantage of this 25-page report — it’s packed with information, infographics and topics such as these and can be a valuable resource when assessing your own small business marketing strategies. It is available for free download here.

Then, contact us to discuss this or other small business news and let us help you develop a comprehensive internet marketing strategy, using content to its best advantage and providing the professional edge — and results — you’re looking for.

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