According to a survey by Websitemazine.com the top 5 social media sites are:
WebsiteMagazine Social Media survery 2010
Website Magazine also learned from the suvery:
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According the white paper the 10 advanced PPC bidding strategies for this economy are:
If you are not advertising online, especially if you are in the retail industry you are missing out in significant sales opportunities.
According to Comscore World Matrix study in July 2007, Canada had the highest online penetration at 70% (20.6 million unique users) even beating out the USA which had 60% penetration. Canadians spend on average 43 hours per month online. While online 78% of Canadian’s use search engines to research online and offline purchases. Out of these doing research 27% purchased online while 45% used the information to purchase via a regular retail channel.
Highest Worldwide Internet Usage per month
The demographics for those searching online are typically adults both females and males with a household income of $60,000 and over. One quarter of the online surfers have post secondary education.
| Adults 18+: | 90% |
| Male vs. Female ratio: | 50 / 50% |
| Household Income $60K+: | 56% |
| Post-Secondary Education: |
24%
|
Source: comScore Media Metrix Canada, May 2005
Although every industry can benefit from search marketing program, by far the one industry that sees the most action from a PPC program is the retail industry followed by Corporate Presence and Travel.
Industry receiving most PPC
Google says the trend for search is increasing despite the recession. Consumers are searching more and the behavior will not change going forward. Google says marketers should not only focus on the conversion aspect of search but also the brand value.
Google’s Maile Ohye says focus on SEO basics and not so much on trying to out smart the search engine algorithms. Google along with other search engines constantly change their rank algorithms, that renders the majority of SEO tactics useless.
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Interview with Google’s Maile Ohye from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) As defined on Search Engine Land:
SEO — search engine optimization — is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” listings on search engines. All major search engines have such listings, where web pages, web sites and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Payment isn’t involved, as it is with paid search ads.
Organic results compared to paid results
A presentation by Morgan Stanley reveals that the top 3 Internet Marketing tactics with the highest return on investment are:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or organic search marketing is one of the top three Internet Marketing tactics. The other two are Paid Search marketing (PPC) and email marketing.
Organic links on a search engine results page (SERP) are generated by the content of your website. Some of this content is referred by other websites, in the form of a link to your site, and counts as a vote of credibility. The more trustworthy the site referring your content the more the vote counts and as a result your website pages will rank higher on a SERP.
Sounds great, however to get your website to rank organically requires a lot time and effort. On average it takes about 3 months to see results once the SEO process is started, compared to PPC where traffic is generated immediately after launching an advertisement campaign.
A SEO project requires two main efforts, content development and getting other sites to link to your website. To develop proper content deep analysis and research of keywords to be used in the content needs to take place. Once the keywords have been identified a copywriter needs to write web page copy.
Once the content has been developed it is critical that other websites link to the content. Some linking will take place on its own. However, it is most likely that resources will be need to be allocated to relationship building where links are actively pursued, better known as link building. SEO experts agree that linking counts for approximately 70% of the ranking factor. The remaining 30% is on-page optimization.
On-page optimization requires that the content be search engine friendly and optimized. If a search engine crawls your site and has problems reading the content it will not index it properly. Therefore, key html tags like the title tag, the H1 (heading tag), ALT image need to be properly structured and written. Also included in the on-page optimization is making sure that the internal link structure adhere to best practices, and your URLs include the theme of your page
Website owners and managers need to understand after all this SEO effort still does not guarantee conversion or sale. After all it is marketing and not sales. Therefore, it may generate increased traffic, but conversion requires understanding how your customer makes the buy decisions. This is where analytics and end user testing become invaluable tools.
E-mail Marketing continues to be the choice of global 1000 companies. In the recent issue of websitemagazine the article points out that over the next 5 years e-mail marketing budgets are poised to grow at a rate of 18.5% per year.
e-mail-deliverability-success-for-retail
Companies prefer e-mail marketing as demonstrated by their budget allocations because it drives results in terms of traffic, awareness and engagement.
