Announcing the Launch of Island Motors Online

Raise Interactive is pleased to announe the launch of Island Motors online. Island Motors is a full service Hilton Island Mechanic shop.  Owner Robert Sefarian makes sure to take the time to fix cars properly and always takes the time to explain options to his clients.

Raise Newsletter 1.2- How to Drive Traffic

How to drive traffic to your website

So you have spent the time and the money to build a website, now how do you get people to your site?  There are a variety of ways to bring traffic to a website including advertising campaigns, word of mouth and search engine marketing.  Advertising campaigns can be effective, however it is very hit and miss and often goes against what you are trying to do online, be cost effective and track results.  Word of mouth is very effective however it is also the slowest form of marketing and probably won’t bring a lot of new visitors to the site.  Search Marketing is what Raise Interactive focuses on and is the most effective way to bring a qualified audience to your site.  If a visitor comes to your site from the Search Engines it means that they typed in a word or phrase that brought your site up.

To market to the Search Engines it is important to identify some key terms.  People always talk about Google and “googling things” online. It is so common because Google holds over 60% of the market share in search engines.  The other major players are Yahoo, MSN and Ask.  These make up most of the other 40% of the Search Engines traffic.  There are also many search engines that focus specifically on certain industries or verticals.  Almost all of these engines have both natural or organic rankings and paid search.  Many also feature Local Search that might be very important to your business.  In the next few newsletters we will focus on explaining how organic search results, local search and paid search results work in deep detail, but first we will focus on defining what these terms mean.

Natural Search Rankings

Natural or organic search rankings are the results that come up on the left side of the page in most Search Engines, as highlighted in the picture.  These rankings are based on complex algorithms that the Search Engines have developed based on the content of your site and inbound links to your site.  Organic rankings get more than 80% of the clicks on a page and carry the most trust from the visitor.

Paid Search Marketing

Paid Search is generally on the right hand side and possibly the top of the page.   These results are determined by an auction style system; basically clients bid on keywords that they feel will bring qualified traffic to their site. It is more involved, but basically the more you are willing to pay for someone to come to your site the higher you will be in the results.

Local Results

There is a third area of the Search Engines becoming more and more important especially to small businesses and these are local results.   Often these are listed at the top of the Search Page.  These results show as people type in local city names combined with keywords.  It is important that your business is listed there as these are often the first results that people see.  These local results often allow you to put in your business hours and coupons.

In the next three newsletters we will examine these three types of results and how you can use them effectively in more detail.  Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions.

This is a newsletter article from Raise Interactive, if you would like to receive our newsletter please fill out our contact form.

Vertical Search Engines and Small Business Marketing

Late last summer there was a ton of press about Cuil, the supposed Google Killer.  This was a new Search Engine that was supposed to steal traffic from Google and make the “next step” in Search.  As we all know now, Cuil is pretty much a punchline in the Search Community with small and dwindling traffic.

The reasons for Cuil’s failure so far can be attributed at least partly to the space and competition.  The Search Market is established, and the current Engines do what they do well.  To get a consumer to change their current search engine you don’t have to be five percent better than Google you have to be 500 percent better and that is a high bar to cross. Consumers are now ingrained to search Google, and “Googling” has entered our lexicon.

It reminds me of when Fox decided it was going to be a “network” like ABC, CBS, and NBC.  They failed for a long time until they had to severely overpay for the NFL, which brought viewers and news, and finally respectability.  But what is the NFL out there that can pull any kind of major traffic away from Google, Yahoo, MSN or even Ask.  It seems a different business model is emerging.

This article from Electronic Retailer Magazine talks about Vertical Search Engines.  These are engines that focus on a specific industry or topic and deliver results suited to those topics. Often these engines use humans to sort the results to keep out spam and make sure results are relevant. While none will approach the traffic of Google they can each siphon off searchers who know what they are looking for and need focused results.

To demonstrate we ran a test  for search results on a subject that brings back very different results.  We ran “steroids” through Google and OmniMedicalSearch and they brought back very different results, which makes sense. Both have paid advertising, OmniMedicalSearch keeps 6 AdSense results at the top of the page and Google runs them on the top and down the side.  On Google the organic or natural results come back with a site to buy steroids, general news about steroids, pictures of bodybuilders, very general, topical results. On OmniMedicalSearch the results come from Medical sites and give the definition of steroids and list different types. Obviously these would be results that would make more sense for a medical professional.  If you wnated to reach Medical professionals with a product OmniMedicalSearch can be a great place to advertise through the Google content network. Other engines actually sell their own space on their sites. Search Engine Watch has a nice list of  vertical engines that you can check out.

The article points out that these engines are like cable television, popping up and taking specialized traffic away from the Search Engines.  The goal is not to try and change everybody, but rather to deliver more focused results to a core group of searchers.

So how can small businesses use these engines?  In actuality, these engines can be a major part of small business strategies.  They can deliver more quality results for less money in the paid search realm and getting ranked in these engines can drive qualified organic search. Ian Howells, general manager of agency services at Pepperjam, one of the nation’s fastest growing online marketing agencies was quoted in the article as saying:

General search engines are focused on returning the most relevant results for the widest variety of searches.”  A vertical search engine puts more effort–much of it human, as opposed to automated–into a much smaller index of results. Typically, the results are of a superior quality. There is far less spam. Results tend to be extremely relevant and the site quality is excellent.”

He points out that while these engines don’t drive nearly as much traffic that the large engines bring, but the traffic that comes to a site through these engines is much more affordable, focused and likely to convert.  That is kind of a mantra here at Raise, bringing qualified traffic that is likely to convert as efficiently as possible.  When we take on clients for a search marketing campaign one of the first things that we do is identify any Vertical Search Engines that will make sense for them.  Often there aren’t any, or we run tests and they aren’t as effective as we hoped but when they work they can be a true home run for a company, especially a small business with a tight budget.

If you have more questions about Vertical Search Engines please don’t hesitate to contact us for a more in depth conversation.

Search Engine Optimization can even affect Town Names

There is a very interesting story in the Times Online from February 25 about the town of Eu in Normandy, France.  It is a resort town that has seen its hotel bookings drop in recent years as more and more tourists make their plans online.  The town name is impossible to find in the Search Engines, most results bring up European Union or other short terms.  So they are considering adding more syllables to the name to make sure it can be found.

This seems extreme but businesses should make this consideration when naming a business or certainly when picking a domain name.  If you can get important keywords into your domain it will help you rank for those keywords.  It doesn’t guarantee rankings but it can be an important piece of the puzzle.

As an an internet marketing company based on Hilton Head Island we see this a lot.  There are a lot of very competitive terms  for Hilton Head Island and sometimes the short term vacation terms completely dominate the long term or local keyword searched.  For instance Hilton Head Rental will bring terms that relate exclusively to short term rentals as opposed to long term rentals for those of us who live here.  We are forced to type in apartments, or long term rentals.  So when picking a company name or a domain name make sure you examine the landscape and attempt to incorporate your major keyword if it makes sense.

How we build websites

When starting Raise Interactive we were posed with a dilemma, how could we be a full service internet marketing agency for small businesses if we couldn’t build affordable websites for our clients.  For most of our customers the web site is the first thing we need to address by building a site or making changes to a current site.  If it is a large project we work with several professional website designers like Webheads, Inc. that we know and trust.  But what about the smaller client, just getting started online who needs an attractive, functioning site but doesn’t need bells and whistles and has a limited budget.

In these cases we use the WordPress platform to build business websites.  Originally started as blogging software it allows us to not only build websites but it is a built in Content Management System, allowing clients or Raise Interactive to easily update the site.  It is a fantastic program that is also Open Source, allowing people to use the platform for free.  It encourages a number of independent developers to make plugins and tools that they distribute, often for free.

On this platform we utilize a number of WordPress Themes from iThemes.com.  We experimented with several free themes or templates and they just don’t do the job.  The iThemes themes are very flexible and customizable, they look great and they have been very stable.  They allow us to cut hours of time off a website design which significantly lowers the price for our clients.  And to give you an idea, this site was built using the Architect Theme from iThemes.

This process allows us to build customizable, great looking, fully functioning sites for our clients that don’t cost an arm and a leg.  And when we do run into a larger job we still have the resources of our network of trusted developers.

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