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Web marketing 201
- 1. Web Marketing 201 Local, Social, PPC, and Measuring Visibility.
- 2. What are we talking about? What role local, social, and PPC play in your overall online success, and what visibility metrics to measure in your online marketing.
- 3. Why are you here? So you can understand the elements that make up these aspects of visibility, and make better decisions moving forward.
- 4. Who am I? My name is Jason Stanley, I’ve been designing and marketing websites since 1997, and I am the managing director of Real Green Analytics.
- 5. What is RGA? Real Green Analytics, also known as Coalmarch, is the digital marketing division of Real Green. We produce BackOffice and LeadBuilder.
- 6. Why are there Legos here? Because Legos are awesome. Also, we want you to have some fun today! This is a lot of information, but it doesn’t have to be scary!
- 7. Owner action! If you see Batman, it means there is a practical action you can take to help improve your online marketing, so keep an eye out for him!
- 8. Ready to get started?
- 9. Hold on to your pants!
- 12. What is local search?
- 13. Why does it matter?
- 14. 7,000,000,000
- 15. 20% of desktop and 50% of mobile devices
- 21. How do you get listed here?
- 25. Citations.
- 27. NAP (Name Address Phone number)
- 29. Be consistent!
- 30. Clean it up!
- 31. Go BIG!
- 32. Reviews.
- 36. How to get ’em.
- 37. Options.
- 38. See how you’re doing Go to https://moz.com/local and enter your business name and zip code.
- 40. What is social media?
- 41. Can you use it?
- 42. So how should you use it?
- 49. How do you do it?
- 53. Engagement & Attraction Followers, shares, comments, and likes.
- 55. What is PPC?
- 56. Pay Per Click
- 60. Keywords
- 62. What impact does it have?
- 63. Weak in organic?
- 66. No click, no $.
- 67. Troubleshooting.
- 68. How do you win at PPC?
- 69. AdWords Express An easy way to get started in PPC.
- 70. AdWords Express 1. Go to adwords.google.com/express 2. Click “create a business” 3. Pick where you’d like your ad shown 4. Create your keyword buckets 5. Write a short ad describing your service/product
- 72. Measuring Visibility. Keyword ranking position, local presence, social mentions, PPC CPC, site visits and pageviews.
- 73. Conversion.
- 74. Measuring Visibility. Keyword ranking position, local presence, social mentions, PPC CTR, site visits, and pageviews.
- 75. Measuring Visibility. Keyword ranking position, local presence, social mentions, PPC CTR, site visits, and pageviews.
- 80. Measuring Visibility. Keyword ranking position, local presence, social mentions, PPC CPC, site visits, and pageviews.
- 83. Measuring Visibility. Keyword ranking position, local presence, social mentions, PPC CPC, site visits, and pageviews.
- 90. Measuring Visibility. Keyword ranking position, local presence, social mentions, PPC CPC, site visits, and pageviews.
- 93. What have you learned?
- 94. You know that local search is critical, and what it takes...
- 95. you know social is important...
- 96. and you know PPC is an effective way to get traffic.
- 97. You know it’s important to track these channels.
- 98. THANK YOU!
- 99. Jason Stanley Managing Director, Real Green Analytics
- 100. Web Marketing 301 We’ll talk about conversion optimization, how to measure it, and choosing an agency!
- 101. Get a free assessment http://www.realgreen.com/experts
- 102. Get in touch! twitter: @jasonmstanley linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmstanley/ email: jstanley@rganalytics.com
- 103. Questions?
Editor's Notes
- Web Marketing 201: Local, Social, PPC, and how to measure it.
- What are we talking about? What role local, social, and PPC play in your overall online success, and what visibility metrics to measure.
- Why are you here? So you can understand the elements that make up these aspects of visibility, and make better decisions moving forward.
- Who am I? My name is Jason Stanley, I’ve been designing and marketing websites since 1997, and I am the managing director of Coalmarch RGA, where I lead a team of 16 talented marketers, designers, and programmers.
- What is RGA? Real Green Analytics, also known as Coalmarch is the digital marketing division of Real Green. We produce BackOffice and LeadBuilder.
- Why are there Legos here? If you attended the 101 class you would have heard because they are awesome and I want you to have fun today!
- If you see Batman, it means there is a practical action you can take to help improve your online marketing, so keep an eye out for him!
- Ready to get started?
- Hold on to your pants!
- Ok, local, social, and PPC.
- Let’s get started with local!
- So first of all, what is it? Put simply, local search matches local explicit and implicit queries against a structured database of local listings. Ok, maybe that wasn’t put simply. It’s kind of a search engine within a search engine. Basically what this means is that if a searcher provides information that Google thinks has local relevancy, it will display the associated local results.
- Why does it matter?
- There are approximately seven billion unique local searches per month on Google in the United States. If your business sells products or services to customers located in your geographic area, optimizing for local search will almost always be a must for you. Both Google and Bing have indicated that over 20% of all desktop search queries are local in nature and that somewhere around 50% of queries on mobile phones and tablets are local. These percentages will only increase in the coming years.
- Both Google and Bing have indicated that over 20% of all desktop search queries are local in nature and that somewhere around 50% of queries on mobile phones and tablets are local. These percentages will only increase in the coming years.
- And Google has changed how they display local results, with much more prominence, making it critical for businesses to show up here. If you attended my 101 session you know we focused on the biggest factors it takes to show up in organic results,
- the ones highlighted in green here.
- Anytime a searcher searches a term with local intent--such as local services like lawn care and pest control--it has a chance of triggering local results, which show up here. Pretty good real estate on the search engine results page, wouldn’t you agree?
- Let’s take a closer look.
- These results can include a “Local Pack” (a list of businesses and addresses, shown here) or a “Carousel” (a series of pictures across the top). Both are intended to provide a more visual representation of the businesses in the area that provide that product/service. This block is a blend of local information and social signals in the form of reviews.
- Ok, we get it, a lot of people are performing local searches, and Google gives it really good position on the results page. So how do you get listed here?
- There are two major components of a local search strategy: Citations and Reviews.
- In short, citations are the listings across the web where your business information is displayed, like on Yelp and YellowPages.com.
- Reviews are when customers post reviews of your company on your Google+, Yelp, or other profile.
- Let’s start with citations.
- To be listed in Google’s local results, a business needs to have their business information listed on the websites that send local information to Google. These websites include some familiar sites (such as Yelp, YellowPages, and Yahoo), but also include sites that the average business owner has never heard of (such as Localeze, Acxiom, and Infogroup).
- There are dozens of websites where your company can be listed, so the ultimate goal is to have it listed as many places as possible. The common acronym for the structure of a citation is NAP--that means it contains your Name, Address, and Phone number in each location.
- The trick is, it’s probably listed in most of them already. This may sound like a good thing, but it can actually cause time consuming problems. The reason it, if you’ve ever changed business names, moved to a new office, or changed phone numbers, those previous listings are probably listed online in addition to the current, correct ones.
- That brings us to the most important part of local citations: consistency. If old, inaccurate listings do exist in Google Maps, Yellow Pages, or any other website, you need to have them updated or removed. This means either manually contacting every site and updating them yourself, or paying for a cleanup service like Moz Local to do it for you.
- Keep in mind that cleaning up your local citations is not an overnight process. The listing websites can have long verification processes, some of which take up to 6 months or more to be updated fully.
- At the end of the day, a large number of accurate, consistent citations is the key to ranking well in local.
- Ok, so that’s citations. The other piece to your successful local strategy are reviews.
- Getting customers to review your business online is the other way to win in local.
- While reviews haven’t been linked directly with better rankings in local, we can at least say that a large number of positive reviews can encourage searchers to choose your business over a business with fewer or less positive reviews.
- For the purposes of this presentation I want to communicate the importance of reviews as it pertains to local search. They will help you stand out and earn more clicks from your search engine result page, so they are critical to your overall strategy.
- There are a number of resources online about how to increase the number of reviews your business has, but the first step is to just start asking for them. This means telling your service reps to mention it at the end of a service trip, mentioning it in your post-service emails, or talking about it when you’re on the phone with customers.
- If you are interested in learning more about actually generating reviews for your business I would recommend joining Maria Mayorga for her Reputation Management session, where she really focuses on review generation. Also, check out My Local, the review tool from Real Green.
- Go to moz.com/local and enter you business name and zip code. This will tell you what areas you need improvement in. We use moz local at Real Green Analytics as part of our LeadBuilder package to optimize citations.
- Ok, great, now you have a pretty good notion of how local works. Let’s dive into social.
- First, what is social media? Social media is made up of websites and applications that allow users to create and share content and participate in social networking. The most popular social media sites include Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.
- The concept of social media is ever present in our society, but what is its place in the business world? Can you use it as a tool to create more business? The long term answer is yes, but the short term answer is no--social media is not the best tool for driving sales, at least not until the later stages of a campaign. The idea here is that you need to build up an audience on social befor it can be an effective sales tool.
- A business’s Facebook page, Twitter account, Google+ profile, etc--is all about engagement and loyalty. With the average American spending 3+ hours a day on social media*, you want to play a role in that increasingly popular space. *Source: http://www.marketingcharts.com/online/social-networking-eats-up-3-hours-per-day-for-the-average-american-user-26049/)
- Let’s take a look at what Triangle Pest Control is doing with their Facebook page. Many companies think that you should use social like you do your sales staff--ask for business, offer discounts, and nothing else. But that can turn away potential customers. Users of social media do not want their fun to be interrupted.
- Instead, focus on the human side of your business. Show your employees having fun, share funny video clips, give advice. Your followers will appreciate that kind of interaction much more than a nosey sales push.
- Two words. Brand advocates. If you can present yourself as a helpful authority in your industry in social, your followers will learn to appreciate and respect you.
- What does that do for your company? It means that they will speak positively of you, recommend you to friends looking for a similar service, and be great customers in general. No one is “loyal” to Walmart--they are popular because of their selection and prices, not their customer engagement.
- Old Spice, on the other hand, has brand loyalists. Why? Because they offer entertainment despite being in the relatively boring industry of personal hygiene. They even went as far as to make videos answering their followers’ question. If you can appeal to your followers in the right way at the right time, you’ll create customers for life. (Source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/13/old-spice-tweets-youtube/)
- Winning at social comes down to sharing the appropriate type of content at the right time. You can think of it like being a used car salesman. At the end of the day, you’re trying to sell cars. But, what type of tactic is going to be more receptive to your potential customers? Talking about how great your cars are and how good the deals are? Or getting to know them a little, asking them about their families, and sharing tips about the buying experience?
- Ok, so how do you do it?
- We recommend spending ⅓ of your time sharing useful information,
- ⅓ of your time interacting with your community and sharing personal interactions,
- and ⅓ of your time sharing links and promotions (the more salesy stuff).
- From an owners perspective, you just need to be looking at 1) engagement and 2) attraction. Take some time every week or month and view your company’s social accounts. How many followers do you have? Make a note of the average number of shares, comments, and likes your posts get. Are your social media posts following the ⅓ - ⅓ - ⅓ rule or are they all about your business? Track these metrics over time and you’ll have a good handle on the progress of your social accounts.
- So we have tackled local and social. Next up is PPC, or pay per click advertising.
- What is PPC?
- PPC is pay per click advertising
- You set it up through a Google AdWords account.
- In Google, these are the ads that come up at the top and side of the search results.
- Running a PPC campaign boils down to two factors: What keywords do you bid on and how much do you pay per click?
- Before you start your campaign, you get to choose every keyword you want to bid on. So, let’s say you want to boost sales for your perimeter pest control service in the spring. You can choose to only bid on keywords related to that service. This way, you’re only targeting exactly what you need.
- Any time someone searches for a keyword you’re targeting, an auction takes places, just like Ebay. An algorithm decides which ads to show where based on the quality of the ads and the bid set by the advertisers. The actual cost per click changes every time an auction takes place, but you can pay anywhere from $2-$20 for most keywords.
- How does it impact your online marketing?
- PPC is a great way to gain new customers, especially if you do not currently have a strong organic rank.
- PPC allows you to identify search terms that you might not ordinarily think of. You can download a report of which keywords triggered your ad and optimize your website content accordingly. This is a great way to identify new blog topics.
- It allows you to measure your hard work and adjust your strategy as often as you would like, If you know you are more likely to sell one product or service than another for any given month, you can adjust the ad campaigns accordingly. ex> Lowe’s would be more likely to set up an ad campaign for snow shovels in the winter and lawn mowers in the summer. Modifying these ads through PPC is much more convenient than other advertising mediums.
- If your ad text doesn’t attract the searcher, he or she won’t click. You will be able to see how many times your ad appeared and how many people clicked it.
- If your website content doesn’t address the user’s need, you will probably notice a low conversion rate -- ie. form submissions, phone calls, or anything else you might be tracking in Analytics.
- The best strategy for PPC is “ABT”. Always Be Testing. If your ads aren’t getting clicked on, you can see that right away and come up with new ads to test. If your visitors are not contacting you when they reach your website, you could test building new pages to see if they convert better.
- AdWords Express is a great way to introduce yourself to the industry without getting overwhelmed with complexity. Instead of having different campaigns, ad groups, keywords, extensions, etc, you create one basic ad and let Google do the work for you. You can’t be as surgical as a full fledged campaign, but it is a great way to get started.
- To get started, go to adwords.google.com/express, click on “Create A Business”, and input your business information. Then, pick where you’d like your ad shown, create general buckets of keyword topics you’d like to target, and write a short ad describing your service/product. For more information, visit Google’s help article here (http://youtu.be/3kORFrsMlYc).
- If you joined me for the 101 session you’ll know we talked about two main factors that contribute to online success, Visibility and Conversion. So far we have discussed the top influencing factors that contribute to gaining greater visibility online, including organic, local, social, and PPC. But how do you measure how well you are doing? What the boss wants to know.
- The whole point to these factors is to get visibility in search and to drive qualified traffic to your website, so it stands to reason that you would measure your keyword ranking position, local presence, social mentions, PPC cost per click, and site visits and pageviews.
- A note about conversion. Conversion is what happens when a prospect gets to your website, which is what we’ll be focusing on in our 301 session. Conversion has its own set of metrics that you’ll want to track, and we’ll cover those in that session.
- Ok, how do you track these things? We use a variety of tools to help measure these critical areas. The most important tool you can use is Google Analytics. This is absolutely necessary in order to measure your online efforts.
- For keyword ranking and local presence we utilize tools within Moz analytics.
- You can see here that we have our list of keywords and their relative ranking position nationally. You want to rank in the top 7 for your main keyword combinations, because that will get you on the first page of search results.
- We also measure how effective a website’s local presence looks like through Moz Local.
- This view shows us where we need to work to improve the local citations.
- These three are Foursquare, YP, and Best of the Web. What you are measuring here is complete citations across the web. This will help ensure your position within local results.
- You can use the built in reporting to track your social efforts, Facebook insights has some great data. The main thing to track here is going to be likes, and the growth you experience here.
- Here is an example of what Facebook Insights reporting looks like.
- You want to measure your growth in Total Page Likes.
- Google Analytics provides us with data for PPC cost per click, site visits, and pageviews.
- Here you can see what a AdWords dashboard looks like. Bear in mind this is a separate dashboard from your Google Analytics account. You can see here we are looking at August to October from last year.
- And if we hop over to Google Analytics we can view things from the same period like...
- the number of visitors and...
- the number of pageviews.
- and if we shift over a little we can see the percentage of new vs. returning visitor. We are looking for a healthy percentage of this traffic to be from new visitors- which we can typically group into the prospects category of visitors, or not existing customers.
- All of this adds up to keeping track of how visible your website is online and how well it is attracting visitors, which is why it is so important to track.
- Now that is a lot to keep track of, admittedly, and you have a lot of things that demand your time. One way around the challenge to track these things is to create your own spreadsheets and enter in the data once a month from your various sources. This is a totally viable option.
- For our clients at Real Green Analytics we have built a report that pulls in data from Moz and Google Analytics and distills it down to the most important factors. You can sip your coffee like President Business here and review your reports. This is the September 2014 report for one of our clients (Blades of Green). We are working on connecting to Facebook Insights to pull in the likes metrics that I mentioned, we should have that in our report early this year.
- For our clients at Real Green Analytics we have built a report that pulls in data from Moz and Google Analytics and distills it down to the most important factors. You can sip your coffee like President Business here and review your reports. This is the September 2014 report for one of our clients (Blades of Green). We are working on connecting to Facebook Insights to pull in the likes metrics that I mentioned, we should have that in our report early this year.
- What have you learned?
- You know that local search is critical, and what it takes to win. The two main factors to local success are citations and reviews.
- You know that social is important to build a relationship with your customers and retain them longer. Social also is becoming a more important ranking factor (think mentions and brand awareness).
- You know that PPC is a great way to drive traffic to your website, especially if you can’t rank or compete organically for terms.
- You know it is important to track these channels, and also what is a good number for each and what isn’t.
- Thank you!
- I hope you found the presentation interesting and learned more about online marketing. Thanks for spending the hour with me!
- So in this presentation we learned more about gaining visibility in search. In our 301 session we talk about conversion, what to do with all of the prospects we are driving to your site, and how to measure it. We’ll also discuss some things to consider when choosing an agency.
- Get a free assessment! Fill out the form on this page and we’ll prepare a full website assessment to let you know exactly how well your website is performing.
- I’d love to hear from you! Reach out to me on twitter, linkedin, or email! If you would like to learn a bit more or are interested in a free website assessment visit the LeadBuilder booth here at the show and talk to myself, Teryn, or Rachel.
- Questions? Time permitting, if not, feel free to visit our LeadBuilder booth, we’d be happy to talk shop.