Colorado Springs Internet Advertising

WSI Expert Internet Marketing, a  Colorado Springs internet marketing consulting firm founded and operated by internet expert Tom Kuthy has recently completed the on-page search engine optimization  for  Online Dancewear,  an international provider of specialty dance clothing and accessories for women and girls.

Online Dancewear had made little effort to optimize the site for organic search efficiency in the past. After partnering with Tom, they decided it was time to overhaul the site’s architecture and link structure to increase visibility in the search engines.

The first step in optimizing the site based on existing search volume was to conduct thorough key word research. Through a process known as “semantic mapping”, Tom was able to compile and cluster keywords with similar meaning into major and minor groups.

These key word groups were then mapped to the categories of products already offered by Online Dancewear as follows:

Dance Shoes

Dance Clothes

Dance Costumes

Dance Tights

Tutus

Leotards

Unitards

Dance Bags and Accessories

Capezio

Bloch

Closeout

While some E-commerce sites group products based on “common sense” categories, WSI Expert Internet Marketing took the unique approach of creating purely search-driven categories directly corresponding to keyword search frequency in the semantic map.  The only one of these categories that does not correspond to the semantic map is the Closeout category, which serves a strictly practical purpose for disposing of the client’s discontinued inventory.

The next step in the web site re-work process was to map key words that still contained a high amount of search volume but did not apply to main categories to the product sub categories. Based on the semantic mapping exercise, sub category keywords were easily grouped underneath the primary categories.  In all, the firm has optimized Online Dancewear’s site for 73 keywords as follows:

DANCE COSTUMES
Dance Competition Costumes
Ballet Costumes
Dance Recital Costumes
Lyrical Dance Costumes
Hip Hop Dance Costumes
Jazz Dance Costumes
All Dance Costumes

The new site went live at the end of August 2011, and the engines are rapidly indexing all of the new content.  Preliminary analysis indicates that organic search volume is up as is conversion. During the next six month, off page optimization as well as organic link building should accelerate these trends.

Internet marketing attempts to increase customer loyalty over time by building brand awareness and engagement.  When we look at the pool of prospective customers, it is clear that turning the general public into an evangelist for your business does not happen overnight.  Fear not, though, there are tools to encourage the customer to increase their loyalty at every level.

WSI Colorado Springs marketing techniques move constituents of your brand through the following spectrum, by utilizing one or more the tools listed with each step:

1.  Suspects: may or may not be aware that your product or service is an option.  Solution: PPC advertising, SEO, and local maps listings to ensure you’re on their radar.
2. Prospects: familiar with your offerings and willing to give you a try, but not urgently.  They need to be wooed.  Solution: email marketing and targeted landing pages that address their needs. 
3.  Customers:  primed and ready to become lifelong Fans.  Solution: exclusive email marketing and social media engagement. 
4. Fans: They love you, now give them the tools to spread the word. Solution: nurture them with social media, exclusive online content, and a lot of love. 

By continuing to usher Suspects, Prospects, Customers, and Fans through this funnel, your Fan base is sure to grow inch by inch, and bring your revenue right along with it. 

Search Engine Optimization is like buying a car.  Traditional advertising and marketing is like leasing a car.  In traditional advertising, you spend a lot of money to see the benefits of exposure and increased sales. But once the term of your campaign is over, so are the leads.  When you buy a car, however, you make an investment up front and enjoy it for its lifetime. 

Search engine optimization on your website will keep the leads coming.  No one can deliver local Colorado Springs SEO like WSI.   So if you’re on board and ready to go shopping, you’re probably wondering what’s better: manual or automatic?  4WD or 2WD? In other words, you have no idea where to start.

There are two critical tactics that are part of every SEO campaign: On-page and Off-page optimization.  This week we will talk about off-page optimization.  Search engines use the popularity of a website to judge how worthy of top placement it is.  That means: are people talking about your website on social media sites?  Are there other sites linking to yours? What kind of reputation do you have online?

It’s critical to your local Colorado Springs SEO campaign that you’re engaging in some of the following off-page tactics:

1. Blogging.  Using a 3rd party provider like Blogger or Wordpress provides favorable content for the search engines to read as well as infinite opportunities to link back to your main website, boosting up your web cred. 
2. Distributing articles, press releases, and videos tagged with links to your site create hundreds of additional instances of your company information across the web.
3. Submitting your information to mapping, directory, and business profile listing sites further solidifies your legitimacy and sends you up the ranks of Colorado Springs SEO results.

Okay, so you manage a business that has been faithfully serving the Colorado Springs area for maybe 2 years, or maybe 22.  But there’s no doubt that however long you’ve been in business you’ve had to retool your marketing strategy over and over again to adjust to the Colorado Springs internet marketing landscape.  You’ve stopped advertising in one channel and started in another as local publications, radio stations, and TV networks enter and exit the market.  You’ve probably built a website, but have you spent any time actually marketing it to your customers?

Many local entrepreneurs have their hands full with simply keeping their website accurate; let alone creating an ongoing internet marketing strategy.  Even as a business owner in the Colorado Springs internet marketing field, I struggle with the same problem.   The reality is, though, that with a diverse internet marketing plan you can easily do both. 

I am proud of WSI because of the local Colorado Springs internet marketing plans we create for our clients that are easy to manage and show real results.  A combination of any of the following can increase new customers and the loyalty of existing ones.  Here are some of the options available to you:

1.  Recruiting new customers:
   1. Pay-per-click advertising (PPC).  Display ads on the searches your future customers’ are making every day to find your competitors.
   2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO).   A variety of techniques that make your website come up higher on search engine results.
   3. Google Places Optimization.  Google places show up at the top of the search engine results for service providers.  Think: the new Yellow Pages.
2.  Increasing existing customer engagement
   1. Social Media. It’s hard to avoid this one.  Communicate with your customers at all their favorite online playgrounds.
   2. Email Marketing. Inform customers about promotions or new services, and keep your company top of mind.
   3. Video marketing. YouTube is the second most searched site on the web to Google.  Give your customers inside looks at your product, key staff, or location.
3. Increasing Sales and Offline engagement
   1. Conversion Optimization.  This is a highly specialized practice that makes it easier for your customers to check out in your online store or encourages other action, whether it’s joining your email list or calling for a dinner reservation, etc.

In the Colorado Springs marketing landscape, no one provides a better pulse of the current marketing climate than the local newspaper, the Colorado Springs Gazette.   Across the country, local daily newspapers are folding as their readers continue to age and a younger, more web savvy generation reads national and international news exclusively online.   Many people are starting to send the paper to the recycling bin before it even hits the coffee table.  Maybe you’re even running ads for your business in the Gazette without subscribing to the paper yourself.

Advertisers continue to direct larger and larger shares of their marketing dollars towards more targeted marketing efforts like Pay-per-click advertising and Google Places optimization that provide higher ROI. The Colorado Springs Gazette, amazingly, is one of the few local papers that has managed to emerge from their Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing partly because of their ability to offer online Colorado Springs marketing tactics for LOCAL businesses. 

WSI provides local Colorado Springs marketing professionals with an arsenal of tools to get ahead of the curve by expertly executing localized internet marketing campaigns.  This means cutting the advertising spending that feels like a “throw it against the wall until it sticks” marketing approach like yellow pages and print advertising and instead focusing fewer dollars on more measurable and profitable online marketing with a firm right here in Colorado Springs.

Time was, back in the early days of PPC advertising, that the Content Network never really got you the same results as “regular” PPC ads. Well, as with all things on the Internet, times have changed. 

The Content Network is Google’s version of placing text ads next to content which Google deems to be relevant to the ad text.  The following screen shot, while obviously old, is a good illustration of what Google’s content network does. In this case, it is putting Hummer Ads next to a New York Times article about Hummers.  (I told you it was old – Hummers are no longer even sold!

The criticism that used to be leveled against the Content Network was that it violates the very essence of PPC because the ad is placed next to relevant content, and not in response to a query.  Thus, the ad appears less relevant than regular PPC.  I think this criticism is still valid, and unless the content is very relevant, and you are getting a lower CPC than regular search, the ads probably will be less cost effective. Fortunately, lower CPC’s and increasing the relevance of the placement is just what Google has done over the years.

Today, the Content Network is typically just as cost effective as regular PPC and in many cases even more so.  The only way to find out is to start broad; using both regular PPC and the content network, and then let the data tell you where to cut back until you find what works for you.

‘’We can get you number one position on Google!” How many business owners have heard that worn out claim by so-called internet marketers?  Of course you can be number on Google – all you have to do is bid more for any given keyword than anyone else, and voila –your number one!

You can also buy a TV spot on the super bowl if you have enough money, but that does not mean you will get a return on your advertising investment (ROI). 

The beauty of Colorado Springs Pay Per Click Advertising as WSI practices it, is that we can determine if bidding enough to be number one on Google gets you a positive return or not.  If the bids are generating a positive ROI, than we continue bidding that amount.  If not, we reduce the bid on that key word, or eliminate the key word  entirely, until we find only those keyword-bid combinations that deliver that maximum ROI for an advertiser’s budget. That, friends and neighbors, is what PPC optimization is all about.

So let’s take a look at some interesting facts about ad placement and click-through-rates to see what can happen to the advertiser that ignores optimization. The following is from a click tracking study that shows the percent of clicks that come from the various organic and paid search positions on the search engine results page:

What immediately jumps out at me from this information is that position number 5 gets more clicks than position number 3 or 4. Yet, in the engines bidding price structure, position number 3 and 4 will cost more than position 5.  So does that mean you should always go for number 5? No.  It simply means you need to monitor the ROI of every keyword-bid combination to make sure you are getting the most bang for the buck.

In a subsequent post I will explain how WSI Local Adworks dynamically optimizes based on performance and re-allocates our advertiser’s budget to the best performing keyword-bid combinations.

According to Hitwise, in October 2010, Google took 72.2% of all US searches.  Because of Google’s dominance, many Colorado Springs pay per click advertising practitioners simply place their ads on Google and call it a day.  Well, that is a mistake.

Yahoo and Bing command a combined share of about 24% of all the searches, and have relatively less competition for advertising.  Given the bid-pricing model of all three engines, you may be able to get the same keyword in a higher position on Yahoo or Bing than you could on Google for less money.

In addition, Yahoo and Bing tend to skew to different demographics than Google.  In general, yahoo and Bing have an older demographic skew, which may be a better fit with your target audience.

Just like picking too few keywords, using just one engine simply limits your ability to find the lowest cost way to generate leads for your business.  There is simply no way of predicting which keyword-engine combinations will deliver the lowest cost per lead.

Best practices in the PPC advertising business is like creating a sculpture from a block of stone.  You start with all major engines and large lists of keywords and then chip away the non-converting key words that cost a lot, but produce only a little, until you optimize your budget – and turn that block of stone into a beautiful statue.

When building out a pay per click advertising campaign, the temptation is always to pick a few high volume key words, write a couple of ads and get the campaign up and running. Unfortunately, that is a recipe for a high cost per click, and a high cost per conversion.

The search engines use a bid pricing model for key words, and the higher the volume, the more the advertiser interest, and therefore the higher the bids.  However, the real gold in Colorado Springs pay per click advertising is in finding those key words that are relevant to the advertiser’s business but do not have a lot of competition.  Take a look at the list below from my pay per click campaign:

This data, taken from the Google keyword tool shows the number of monthly searches, and estimated average cost per click (CPC) for 8 terms relevant to my business. The last 6 terms on the list will be significantly less costly to bid on that the first two. However, the combined volume of the last 6 is 1,981 monthly searches, more than the highest single volume term.

This, in a nut shell, shows the power of the long tail in PPC.  There are at least a thousand long tail terms being searched every day for most businesses.  While individually they are not as powerful as the big volume terms, collectively they can be very powerful.