Posts Tagged ‘Search engines’

Free Marketing Report - 50 Marketing Charts & Graphs

Monday, May 10th, 2010

HubSpot.com has recently published an incredible report of over 50 charts and graphs of original market research.   The report clearly shows a significant shift for many businesses from outbound marketing (print, radio, telemarketing, direct mails) to inbound marketing (SEO, Blogs, Social Media).

The report itself is an interesting read for any marketer or business owner and you can download it free at Hubspot website.

Here are a few key statistics about the state of Inbound Marketing and why it works:

Larger websites perform better.

Businesses who’s website has more than 300 indexed pages in Google generate over 200% more leads than businesses with fewer than 300 indexed pages.

Bottom line: larger websites tend to perform better in search results.

Source: State of Inbound Marketing Lead Generation Report - http://bit.ly/cVMpkn

Bloging more often drives results

Bottom line:  The more often you blog, the more customers you’re likely to get via your blog.

A weekly updated blog generates 20% more leads than monthly updated blog.  Daily updated blog performs 30% better than weekly updated blog.

Source: State of Inbound Marketing Report - http://bit.ly/aewfHr

Blogging adds huge SEO value to websites

Companies that blog have 434% more indexed pages.

Bottom line: Adding a blog (and blogging often) is the easiest way to generate relevant pages and boost your rankings in search engines.

Source: Data from over 1,500 small businesses - http://bit.ly/XDkQV

Inbound marketing works!

According to HubSpot study there are two big reasons for businesses to focus more on inbound marketing.

A - Economy.   92% of businesses cited economy to be the biggest reason for them to increase their inbound marketing budget.  Inbound marketing cost less.

B - Past success with Inbound Marketing.  58% of businesses cited they had a success with inbound marketing in the past (as opposed to 4% of respondents who said they had success with outbound marketing).

51% of surveyed businesses said they increased their inbound marketing budget in 2010 compared to 2009.

Bottom line:    Inbound marketing works!

Source: State of Inbound Marketing Report - http://bit.ly/aewfHr


Inbound marketing is more effective

According to HubSpot, inbound marketing has an incredible 60% lower cost per lead!

Bottom line:  Inbound Marketing is more cost effective.

Source: State of Inbound Marketing Report - http://bit.ly/aewfHr

Inbound Marketing is important for lead generation.

Virtually every aspect of inbound marketing has grown this year compared to the last one.

SEO and organic search has grown in importance by 4%, up to an incredible 59%.

Blogs have gain 2% in importance compared to last year. 48% of businesses view blog as important tool for lead generation.

Social Media has grown the most: up by 14%.  60% of businesses view social media as an important lead generation tool.

Bottom line:   Inbound Marketing is becoming more important to many businesses.

Source: State of Inbound Marketing Report - http://bit.ly/aewfHr

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Website statistics - what to look for?

Friday, April 30th, 2010
Almost every business with a website does something to market and promote it.  When we ask business owners how well does their website perform, many don’t have the key data to answer this question.
Measuring the performance of your website, where do your visitors come from, what is your conversion rate and what keywords people use to find your website is very important for your inbound marketing strategy. Yet many small business owners still either don’t have access to their website statistics or can’t find the time to make sense from the analytics data.

So what is the easiest, quickest and most user friendly way to track your website’s performance?

Consider adding Google Analytics to your website.  It is free to use and if you ask your web developer to add the tracking code to your website it won’t take him long to install it.

In a recent post at the Online Marketing Blog, Thomas McMahon offers these tips on what to analyze first:

  • Unique Visitors. “If your unique visitor number is low, it could mean that your site is either having issues [with] search engines, or needs more content,” McMahon explains.
  • Traffic Sources. Are you getting traffic from Google, Yahoo, Twitter, or other sites? This information can help decide where and how to promote your future content.
  • Referring Keywords. If these keywords don’t refer to your company, then “maybe you’re not optimized, or optimized for the wrong phrases,” McMahon notes.
  • Top Content. Use the same format as your top content, or build out on those topics, to help drive more traffic, he advises.
  • Location. If your business seeks to have a strong local search presence, the location area in analytics can tell you the country, state, and city of your visitors.
  • Campaign Tracking. This feature helps you track visitors from your ads, wherever they appear, to a particular goal, page or conversion at your website.
The conclusion? With minimal effort you can use analytics to help you improve your website’s performance and increase sales.
Need help adding Google Analytics to your website? Contact us and we’ll set it all up for you in no time.

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Speed Matters: Google Adds Load Time to Algorithm

Monday, April 19th, 2010

Google recently added site load speed into it’s ranking algorhytm.  According to Google, the site speed will only play only a small part in the rankings and the biggest emphasis is still on the content and inbound links.

Although this change may only affect 1% of the search results, having a faster loading website could make the difference between the first and second place in the search results.

There is another, more obvious reason to optimize the load speed of your website. There is a direct correlation between website’s speed and the amount of time visitors spend on it (Source: Internal study by Google, Additional resources at O’Reilly Radar). Faster loading website means more more visitors, more hits and more enquiries.

Please see our post with tips how to make website load faster for more in-depth information.

Although site speed has become integrated into the algorithm, Google still puts tremendous emphasis on relevant content and incoming links. The addition of site speed will only affect a small percentage of search queries performed. Is is therefore still important to create valuable content and build inbound links that will return the best user experience for the visitor.

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Google launched real-time search

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

It was bound to happen someday but now it’s really here: Google just launched a real-time search integrated into search results. It updates as things happen around the web in real-time. Live Twitter updates, news articles, blog posts, Yahoo answers, new web pages, all these now stream in the actual search results on your query.

Here is a demo video from Google:

So what does real-time search mean for your business and your online marketing?

Now it’s more important than ever to be active on the web, making the most of your website and including social media in your online marketing strategy.  You need to consistently produce high quality content that is not only optimized to get found in the top search results, but you also need to produce content that will appear in the real-time stream.

While it may take many months for your website to rank in the top 10 for certain keywords, you now have a chance to grab the attention of your prospects via Google real-time stream results.

If you’re on Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace you really should consistently post new updates.  The benefit is two-fold. Your subscribers and followers on these social networks have the potential to become more deeply engaged with your brand, but now you’ll also have the added benefit of leveraging Google’s massive search audience.

With the arrival of Google’s real-time search, inbound marketing truly is the way to go.  The best you can do with your website is to transform it from a static pages into a small publishing house that produces fresh, interesting content that your prospects are searching for right now, at this very moment, somewhere on the internet.

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