Marketing Answers Blog

The fact that a solid online presence is necessary today is not lost on most companies' marketing teams. We know our sales people are in far less control of conversations with their prospects than they used to be, even to the extent that many have ended up feeling somewhat helpless. Prospects are adept at working around our sales people by conduncting their own detailed research, typically bringing in a sales rep. at the end of the process essentially as an order taker. With the substantially reduced effectiveness of classical 'outbound' sales and advertising venues such as radio, TV, print ads, etc., a vacuum is created yet now filled by inbound marketing.

Contratulations! You've put a lot of time and effort into building your new website because the old one was tired, boring, and just plain, well, old. You may have sunk considerable wads of money into the redesign project by signing on the best graphic designer you could find, and she spent weeks listening to your requirements, understanding your business, and figuring out what you do and don't like about your existing site. She then built your site taking your input into consideration and after many versions and revisions, now she's finally done, and the site looks absolutely fantastic!

If you are a regular reader of our blog, then you should already be aware of the importance of developing content for your site – particularly if you want to generate more traffic and leads. While there are many things you could put on your site (blog posts, white papers, general content about your business), nothing helps your traffic to engage with your site more than video. This is because if it’s done right, it presents an opportunity for you to very quickly transfer a lot of information in a rich and experiential manner. Writing is fine, but studies show that when given the choice between reading the narrative of a short informational video, and clicking the play button, 95% of people prefer to run the video.

Although many businesses are unaware, there is a free and easy way to advertise your business for free on Google. In fact, not only can you advertise for free on Google, but your business will typically show up on the first page of results when users search for terms that you enter in your profile. The way to accomplish this is to set up your business on Google Places which is Google’s solution to the local business directory. Then, results like the following show up with your business information as a result of a relative search entry:

The holy grail of a solid inbound marketing strategy is in having a strong cache of inbound links from sites with authority.

Yes, it’s a big investment in time and energy to write a blog, particularly if you follow conventional wisdom on the topic that says you should do it several times per week if you want to be successful in driving traffic to websites. If you are like many people, you can come up with reasons why blogging may seem an unreasonable proposition:

The title of this article could have been something more directly associated with blogging because the reality is, if you really want to increase search engine traffic, you need to focus on generating quality content, and blogging is the best way to generate a bunch of content. Remember that each blog article counts as an independent page in your site, and Google likes it when you have lots of pages associated with your site.

While a certain amount can be done on your website to promote on-site SEO best practices, this will only take you so far in your quest to rank on the first page in Google. At the end of the day, the real gold lies in link building and this takes time and effort. Following are the five most important things that you can do to promote your site through inbound linking:

We often hear people lamenting the fact that they invested in a re-design to upgrade their websites, only to find that the effort didn't result in an increase in traffic at all. In fact, oftentimes the re-design efforts may have actually worked against some sites because Google doesn't adapt well to large scale changes that occur all at once - it's just the way its ranking algorithm is engineered.