January 27th, 2012 by admin
Many marketers take for granted the search transaction. Many believe it’s simply a matter of a user typing in a search, the search engine spitting out results, and the searcher reviewing them and ultimately deciding on the best one. But this doesn’t take into account the subtle nuances of human behavior. Human beings are irrational, unpredictable and multifaceted beings with different beliefs, backgrounds, and values.
Proficient search engine marketing requires a further examination of searcher behavior. In this post, we will cover a few of the factors that affect searcher behavior.
1. Domain expertise
Domain expertise refers to a searcher’s familiarity with the subject their searching. When seeking specific information, a layman will be less certain how to begin, use less precise language, and have more trouble evaluating the results. Compare this to a subject matter expert who would know the exact verbiage to produce the desired results.
2. Search experience
This relates to a user’s search capabilities and knowledge. Knowing how to use Boolean operators, exact strings, and filtering controls gives you a much bigger tool set to help you search effectively. This factor seems to be secondary to domain expertise, however. Many people with little search experience but a lot of domain knowledge can do better than a technophile searching within an unfamiliar subject.
3. Cognitive Style
This can be thought of as a spectrum between Global thinking and Analytical thinking. Global thinkers will initially seek a breadth of knowledge across related topics, while analytical thinkers will dive into a single topic to find highly specific information. Now keep in mind, this is a spectrum, and these are just extremes. Most searchers will fall somewhere between these two.
4. Goal Type
Goal types can be broadly lumped into three categories:
· Navigational: are efforts to reach a particular web location, for instance an employer’s timesheet.
· Informational: seeking out documents or information related to a specific topic.
· Transactional: are meant to accomplish something online, such as paying a bill.
5. Mode of seeking
Essentially the mode of seeking boils down to someone’s understanding of what they are trying to find. This level of understanding can range from knowing exactly what the user needs and where to find it, to exploratory searching, where they are only loosely able to describe what they seek.
6. Situational idiosyncrasies
Finally, the user is affected by situational idiosyncrasies that are mostly impossible to record. These can include mood, atmosphere, stress level, and any number of other factors.
While many of these factors are difficult or impossible to record, they should help you think about your user’s and the experience they have when searching online. You can shape these factors into different personas to help you better target your web design and search campaigns to better serve the spectrum of your searcher market.
Tags: Cleveland Search Engine Optimization, professional search engine marketing, search engine marketing
Posted in Professional Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
January 20th, 2012 by admin
Though most marketers focus a lot of attention on traffic, site visitors alone will not make your site successful. You can improve site effectiveness by following your marketing programs through to their end results and comparing them with your expectations. It helps to think of a web site as a science experiment, complete with hypotheses. If you implement campaign A, then result B happens. By measuring your actual results against your goals you can make incremental changes to your site for greater conversion.
In order to hit your goals, you’re going to need to make a plan. Your web site should have a maximum of two or three goals. Any more and you’ll be spreading yourself too thin. For each goal you can come up with a general strategy to achieve it, comprised of highly-specific programs. You can experiment with these programs to find out what works best.
In order to come up with these programs, it’s best to take a retrospective view, as if we had already accomplished the goal, and think of ways we might have taken to get here. For instance, we start with a result, say achieving $10,000 in online sales of dog leashes in the first six months of the site. Then we think of a general strategy we might have used to accomplish that, such as informing veterinarians and kennel clubs of your product and website. Finally we think of specific programs to achieve that goal. In this case, you might ask veterinarians office if they will hand out free coupons to customers, exchanging free product for reviews, etc.
By using this funneled approach you can better evaluate the effectiveness of any program. An important point to note is that for each program, you need to put some thought into how you will measure performance. Measures will differ by program, but should be quantitative and meaningful to allow you to improve site performance.
Tags: search engine friendly websites, seo website design
Posted in Search Engine Friendly Web Development | No Comments »
January 16th, 2012 by WendySuto
Regardless of whether you’re a start-up or an established business, it can be tough to promote your business on a limited budget. Often, the most effective marketing campaigns are those that are creative within their means. Though it can help, you don’t have to spend money to promote your business.
Even some of the largest companies are now turning to inexpensive social media venues to get the word out about their products. Here are some cheap ways to use social media to punch your way into the market.
Blog.
A blog is an excellent and increasingly popular way to not only get the word out about your business, but also to create a dialogue with customers. A WordPress blog is completely free. If you can commit yourself to writing one high-quality, engaging blog post a day (or hire someone else to write it), in a few months’ time you will have tens of thousands of visitors hungry for the content that only you can provide.
The key benefit of a blog is the dialogue that it allows you to have with customers. Always try to cultivate a solid batch of comments for every post. Comments are free content. Usually the people commenting are passionate subject matter experts in the field, and potentially valuable contacts for your business. This also allows you to hear what your market wants, and how you can better get it to them. Always attach “Retweet” and “Like” buttons after every article so people can share your post with their friends.
Facebook.
Everybody and their Mom now has a Facebook page. Facebook has quickly become one of the top marketing tools alongside Google’s plethora of marketing gadgets. Use Facebook to share pictures, links, and blog posts to your own blog and other related items of interest.
The key with Facebook is to try and be very organic. When marketing on Facebook, think of it as a way to develop relationships and create exposure rather than trying to sell products. If you have a smart phone you can do this extremely quickly, several times a day to create an engaging story of your businesses’ day-to-day.
Twitter.
For such a simple platform, Twitter can be one of the most difficult to master, although one of the most effective if done correctly. Twitter, like Facebook, is not meant to be a sales tool, but rather a way to indirectly connect with fans and customers. Much like Facebook, you can capture interesting moments of your operation or daily life in your business, or just tweet links of related subject matter. In fact, you can set your Facebook to share anything you tweet, so it can all be done seamlessly.
The key to promoting yourself on Twitter is to follow and engage relevant people within your business or industry, and add value to your peers by offering insight and expert opinion.
Use Video!
Your average web surfer has a rapidly diminishing attention span. With all the ads and links, it can be hard for someone to focus on text alone for longer than a few minutes at a time. You can capture people’s attention better through video, and really show your personality and enthusiasm to your visitors, followers, and friends.
Tags: social media for businesses, social media marketing
Posted in Business Social Networking, Online Social Networking, Social Media | No Comments »
