Internet Marketing Toronto - Ignite!

Creating Strong Calls To Action Improves Length of Stay and Conversions

It’s a well known fact that internet users are impatient and will not take the time to “figure out” your website. Most of us have an objective to achieve when we’re researching businesses or products online and more often than not we only have a few minutes to do it.

As a business you may be doing a tremendous job with your internet marketing and driving traffic to your site, but what’s happening to that traffic when they get to you? Your analytics program can help shed some light on some important statistics about this such as length of session (how long a visitor stays on your site on average), and conversions (people who take a predetermined action on your site such as completing a signup form, or signing up for your newsletter).

There are many factors that can influence these two metrics. “Calls to Action” are the point of our discussion today. As I mentioned earlier, visitors don’t have the time or desire to “figure out” your website. They have an objective to achieve and little time to do it. So, make it easy for them! Take the time to figure out what visitors to your site are most interested in finding out, and doing.

In our case, visitors are interested in finding out how we can help them with their internet marketing, and how their site shapes up against our experts opinions. If we were not great internet marketers, we’d probably just have a home page that talks about us, and only have a contact form on our “Contact Us” page. We’d probably not have a good conversion rate either, and many people would bounce off our home page because they did not easily find what they were looking for. Instead, we have a strong call to action placed in the top left column on every page our website called “Free Website Performance Report”. We also include a link to our privacy statement right there to ensure people are assured their information is safe. By doing so we’ve clearly met the visitors needs up front making it easy for them to complete their objective - find a reputable Internet Marketing firm and find out what condition their site is in.

Ask yourself these questions about your site:

1. What do visitors to my site need to accomplish?
2. What do I want visitors on my site to do?
3. Can they do these right from my home page?

Now that you’ve answered these questions take the time to write out some clear calls to action that address these needs directly. It may require forms on your site, or just textual calls to action to draw visitors into other parts of your site. Either way make it easy for them. After you’ve made your changes start reviewing your analytics and monitor the results! We’re confident you’ll see a marked improvement!

Updates to Yahoo! Local

The Yahoo! Local team have released some updates to the service. Local search is growing in popularity each day. As a result the amount of traffic your site can receive from local searches is growing too.

In the next several weeks we’ll be working with our customers who qualify for local listings to ensure they are listed in Google and Yahoo!

Some of the new features in the Yahoo! local update include leveraging user ratings, reviews and other user-generated content in the results to provide a much better user exprience when looking for local services. You can also comment on reviews and read other poeples comments. These new features will create a much better user experience!

For more on the topic, please see the Yahoo! Local blog post.

Black Hat Cloaking Explained by Search Engine Land

The folks at Search Engine Land have posted a nice explanation of Black Hat Cloaking. In a nut shell, black hat cloaking is the conscious act of serving SEO’ified content to search engine spiders and completely different content regular visitors to your website. Although some would argue that this technique is technically sound because it allows webmasters to optimize for the two very different kinds of users, the majority of webmasters agree that the technique would be abused. More importantly search engines are not looking for content created specifically for them - instead they are looking for content created for end users and with that they determine if it’s good quality content.

We here at Spark Internet Marketing obviously don’t believe in cloaking, never have and likely never will. If you want a more in depth explanation of how cloaking works, visit the SEL Blog.

Stephan Spencer Interviews Maile Ohye - Senior Support Engineer at Google

On August 10th Stephan Spencer interviewed Maile Ohye - senior support engineer at Google. She’s responsible for working with SEO’s and Webmasters to assist them with understanding how to work with Google, as well as to take their feedback and role that into new Google code.

Stephan’s interview covers many topics including the updated Google Webmaster Guidelines, Doorway Pages, Cloaking and general SEO principles. We ourselves found it very interesting and certainly recommend you give it a listen. If you’re interested in hearing the interview, check out Stephan’s posting.

One more reason to add blogging to your Internet Marketing Campaign

Recently, WebPro News discussed how fast Google is able to index content on the internet, specifically with blogs.

Depending on which index you’re trying to hit, your content could show up in Google’s search results in under two minutes. That appears to be limited to blogs, but the big one’s logging times faster than Domino’s Pizza.

For the past couple of weeks, search bloggers have been lobbing times back and forth, some clocking the latest entries popping up in as long as an hour, or as soon as 120 seconds.

Read the full article and you’ll be convinced. Adding a blog to your website and submitting topical, relevant and timely content will help you in the following ways:

• Add keyword rich content to your website
• Consistently deploy fresh content to your site encouraging the search engines to index your pages more frequently
• Increase the “stickiness” factor of your site by giving visitors a reason to check back frequently
• Increases the presence of your website on the internet by creating links in many places including but ot limited to technorati, bloglines, feedburner, delicious, etc.

If you have not considered adding a blog to your site there is no better time than right now. Contact your Internet Marketing Consultant right away, and they will help you get setup very quickly and easily. In fact we recommend WordPress and it’s free!

Top 5 Things To Consider When Choosing An Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Company

Our sales team here at Spark put together this great top five list of things to consider when choosing your search engine marketing company.

5. Does the SEM Company look to improve conversions on your website or do they just look at traffic? A good SEM company will look at your entire business process and try to improve overall sales and not just drive traffic to your site.

4. Is the SEM Company promising first page placement with their Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? If a company is promising that they will get you on the first page of the search engines through search engine optimization then that should be a strong red flag to you that the company isn’t very honest. It is impossible to guarantee first page rankings using SEO because absolutely nobody can control the search engines behaviour. To read more on this check out what Google had to say.

3. How does the SEM Company determine which key phrases they will optimize? The best companies will do the research on key phrases and on competitors within your industry. There are many tools available that will help with this research and all good SEM companies should be using them.

2. Will you be given progress reports on your account on a regular basis? It is important that your company is kept aware of the success/failure of your campaign(s). SEM can be measurable in many ways and receiving progress reports will allow your company to accurately review the ROI. Some of the reports can include but are not limited to; ranking reports, summary of your Google Analytics statistics, summary of pay per click spend, etc.

1. Is the SEM company open and willing to give you case studies or testimonials from their current clients? A good way to determine if an SEM company is going to do the job you expect from them is to check how well they have accomplished the goals of their other clients. If a phone number is provided, do not hesitate to pick up the phone and give them a call.

Our Very Own Adam Green Is Getting Married!

Yes, you heard me right. Adam Green is off to get Married in Vancouver. He’s the last of us get hitched, and we wish him and his fiance Lynn the best! They’ve chosen to get married in beautiful Vancouver - how can you beat that!

Best Wishes to Adam and Lynn from Spark and our loyal, wonderful clients. If you get a chance, please email Adam and congratulate him too!