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Use the Q and A to Generate Traffic

August 15, 2008 – 3:26 pm

As a Doctor, you’ve got the answers to many, many questions that people spend hours searching the internet for: answer them!

Question and Answers areas, or FAQs as we’ve come to know them, can be a great place for you to provide valuable content for potential patients as well as build some great Search Engine Optimized content.

In the end you get more traffic, and more satisfied visitors that can become potential leads.

Use this area to talk about common questions or those specific to your practice. A pediatrician might talk about common cold care, causes, how to protect children, etc. While a general practitioner that works with older adults might talk about back pain treatments, how to take care, etc.

Whatever you do, share your information, and start generating new leads with it.

Greg | Dental and Medical Marketing | Comments (0)

Making Your Law Firm’s Website Matter

August 15, 2008 – 3:10 pm

Too often companies and business owners decide to invest money in a website because ‘everyone else has one,’ which is okay. The problem is when the thought process ends there.

When you contact web design and marketing companies with that simple phrase, “we need a website,” they should be asking your the important questions you might not know to ask yourself.

  • What’s the purpose of the site?
  • Do you plan on generating leads/capturing lead information with the site?
  • Do you plan on using the site as a platform to increase your reputation and status in the legal field?
  • Do you plan on using the website as a marketing tool in and of itself?

You’re answer should be yes to all of these, and if these types of questions aren’t being asked, it’s time to move on to the next web design company and marketing team.

Your website is so much more than a brochure on the web.

Web technologies make websites into their own medium, capable of much more than print advertising and costing much less than most other forms. Its a one time investment to put up a a new channel to generate and capture leads that can keep doing so for years.

Think long and hard before you launch into the project, and make sure you’re working with people that will ask you the questions you don’t know how to ask yourself. Remember that a website is more than a biography with photographs. It’s a living, breathing medium that can generate incredible numbers for your law firm when planned and executed right.

Greg | Legal Marketing | Comments (0)

Online Advertising Overtakes Mainstream TV in UK

August 14, 2008 – 10:36 am

Last year, spending on online advertising overtook that of mainstream TV in the UK last year.

With more than 40 percent or 2.8 billion pounds ($5.3 billion) in growth, online advertising now makes up for 19 percent of all UK advertising according to UK regulator Ofcom.

The report found that Britons are spending four times as much time on computers and twice as much time on mobile phones in 2007 than in 2002.

“We are spending more and more time with our communications devices but spending less on them,” Ofcom’s strategy and market development partner Peter Phillips said in the report, which covers TV, Internet, mobile and fixed-line telephony and radio.

Most of the spending was in paid-for search like Google AdWords. More than 1.6 billion pounds was spent on search advertising.

The trend is continuing to grow as personal devices and internet technologies become more accessible and useful to the average consumer, and industry forecasts predict online advertising to become more relevant and an even large player worldwide.

Greg | General Marketing/E-Marketing | Comments (0)

Wikipedia Founders To Compete Against Google

August 14, 2008 – 10:27 am

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder, is hoping to threaten Google’s dominance over internet search with the launch of Wikia Search, a project spearheaded by the founder of on of the webs most popular websites.

“Right now in the US in particular we have a really strong concentration of the industry,” Wales said Thursday at the Global Brand Forum in Singapore.

More than 90 percent of searches in the United States are carried out on one of three search engines: Google, Yahoo! or MSN.

Many people in the industry have begun sounding their concern over the concentration of the search market into so few competitors, and especially the overall dominance of Google among the three.

“So a lot of people are really concerned about this… Do we really want all of our traffic, all of our editorial control of the Internet all being piped through one, two or three companies?” Mr. Wales asked. His answer is: No, we don’t.

Unlike the major search engines which keep their technology and ranking algorithms under tight wraps, Wikia will be on an open platform, following the same principles of Wikipedia, where users can edit, change and flag entries made by others.

The idea is for users to participate in meaningful ways when browsing, but so far the Wikia Search hasn’t come online, and to date there has been no information released about the possibility of the new and open platform for search engine marketing advertisers.

Read Yahoo Story.

Greg | General Marketing/E-Marketing | Comments (0)

PPC Tips: Adwords Keyword Tool

August 13, 2008 – 12:04 pm

Google’s Adwords has a wide variety of tools and literature to help you get your site performing well on paid searches.

If you’re just starting out your campaign, one tool of particular use is the Adwords Keyword Tool. The tool helps you find keyword suggestions based on your own ideas or what you’ve seen competitors use, then shows the level of competition and traffic these words receive. The numbers are there for an ‘idea’, and don’t take them to close to heart. The range and difference between keywords is really all you need to grab from here — what’s most popular, and what’s not being used by the competition?

The best way for you to get some great keywords out of the shoot is to use the “WEBSITE CONTENT” option. Here, you can enter the URL of your website, Google will look at it, and suggest which keywords you might want to target in your AdWords campaign.

It’ll give you a place to start. From there, you’ll need to keep changing, tweaking, analyzing and improving, but step one is just getting things started.

Give the tool a try and start off on a better foot.

Greg | PPC Campaigns | Comments (0)

Real Estate Marketing: Build Inbound Links

August 13, 2008 – 11:52 am

Inbound links, or sites linking to your website, are one of the most important factors in your Google PageRank and search engine relevancy.

If no one is linking to you its possible to rank well, but its an uphill battle. Getting sites to link back to your content will keep your site popular in search engines and also increase your exposure.

Think of it this way: if no ones linking to you, they either don’t know about you or your site isn’t worth linking to. If its the latter, we’ve got more than link building issues to deal with, and we’ll save that for another post.

But if they just don’t know about you, we can fix that.

HOW TO GET REAL ESTATE LINKS

There are many free and non-expensive ways to get your link into high traffic areas and grab attention.

You can submit articles on real estate tips and your areas of expertise to directories like eZineArticles, which always contain a link back to your website. You can put out Press Releases online with important announcements, new listings/neighborhoods you’ll represent, etc with PRWeb (not free) and others that won’t charge you. The list goes on.

All of these sites are high traffic areas, and in the case of PRWeb and others, they submit your content into major online and traditional media feeds like Google News and the Associated Press. All of this adds up to major exposure and quality back links.

IT’S WHO YOU KNOW

Networking is probably your best and cheapest route. Who do you know? Who don’t you know that you should? Find relevant websites run by peers and fellow professionals. They don’t have to be real estate agents, they can be home improvement bloggers, or interior designers. Get in touch, shake some hands, and see if you can trade links (you put your link on their website, they put theirs on yours).

Get out there and mingle and build your reputation.

You can’t succeed without traffic, and you can’t have traffic without being visible.

Greg | Real Estate Marketing | Comments (0)

Dental eMarketing: World Wide & Local

August 12, 2008 – 10:50 am

According to surveys over the past year, more than 74% of US households go to the internet search engine when looking for local goods and services.

It used to be the yellow pages that dominated this market. But with the advances in search technology, faster internet connections, and better computers, why would we page through a thick, poorly organized book when we just have to type in a few words and click ’search’?

You need to be aware of these trends as a local service provider. While word of mouth and other traditional forms of media marketing, like the trusted yellow pages, are still viable, the bigger area is now online.

If you’re website isn’t designed to rank well in search engines, especially for local terms, you might as well not have on at all.

It’s there to be found by natural searches, people looking for your service in your area.

You don’t need to have an online store, fancy graphics, expensive content management systems, but you do need to have the right content, written the right way, to become a relevant site in Google and other search engines’ eyes.

If you’re still holding out on putting up a website, consider it for what it is: a more advanced and powerful yellow page entry that has the potential to become your number one source of new leads and patients.

Convinced yet?

Get online!

Greg | Dental and Medical Marketing | Comments (0)

Google Tips: Site-Wide Links

August 12, 2008 – 10:33 am

A site-wide link is a link to an outside website that appears on each page of a website.

For example, if my site www.whitehatfirm.com linked to Google.com, on every single web page.

When trading links it can sometimes seem like a good idea to get your link on as many pages as possible, but there’s evidence to the contrary.

Google, when it sees a link, in the same area, with the same properties, on every single page (like a links area on a sidebar), is suspicious that the link is artificial, not really there because its relevant to that page’s content, but because the webmaster just wants it to be there.

This is where it hurts. If it isn’t relevant, Google doesn’t care, and your ranking will go down, or most likely just not benefit very much from the inbound link.

Keep this in mind when you talk to other webmasters to trade links. Pick the places you want your site to appear. Make sure its relevant and not just a pasted link that appears in the same place on every page.

And of course, return the favor.

Greg | Google | Comments (0)

Lawfirm Marketing Online: Be Personal

August 11, 2008 – 11:06 am

Legal issues are heavy, serious, and personal. Meet your client face to face on your website.

When visitors land on your website looking for your help, they need to know who you are right away. We need to instill trust and reputation almost instantly in order to get them to keep browsing and see your services, history, etc. But first we just need to get them to stay.

Your home page should have a photo of the lawyer(s) in your firm or practice, with a simple subtitle explaining who is who. A photo of the physical location, ie a picture of the building from the street, will help to establish location and trust. You’re a part of their neighborhood, you’re a real person, you can probably help them. That’s the message we want to send in seconds.

Besides these two key photos, the text on your home page should be short and sweet. Reach out to the client, make it personal. Cold, stale and overused copy will be ignored. You don’t need to tell your life story, on the contrary, you need to be short, concise, original and to the point.

Whatever distinguishes your practice, make it known right away. If it takes you more than 300 words, you’ve already said too much, or maybe you need to sit down and distill your law firm’s character then try writing again.

Reach out to these visitors. You’re their friend, you’re going to help them resolve the issues that can be hard to get their head around, and make sure it all ends correctly.

Now that you’ve got their attention and tentative trust, tell them what to look at next, whether that’s your track record, your history, or whatever you deem most important according to your practice and your business style.

But first, you’ve got to be personal and establish a sense of trust and belonging.

Greg | Legal Marketing | Comments (0)

SEO Tips: Page Load Times

August 11, 2008 – 10:58 am

While not exactly an SEO issue, it is so closely related to the converting those visitors you receive from SEO efforts that it bares mentioning here.

Does your page take too long to load?

After all the hard work you put into ranking high on search engines and generating traffic, you could be shooting yourself in the foot if you’re not making sure you site loads fast.

Most of us web browsers are the same in that we have zero patience. If something is taking too long to load, we’ll just click back and look for another site to check. Slow load times look unprofessional, their annoying, and as a result you’re starting off on the wrong foot with a potential customer.

What makes a page load slow?

Load times are affected by the code and the images you’ve got on a web page. If you’re site is heavy with tables, lots of white spaces around code, and superfilous HTML, it will load slower. If you’re site is super heavy on images, it will load even slower. While there are other factors that effect your page load time, these are the major ones.

Whatever page your visitor will be landing on should be as cleaned up as possible, using as few images as possible. If the user wants to see more pictures of a property listing or other item on your site, that should be a secondary page easily accessed from where the traffic will land.

Keep page load times and make the most of the traffic you’ve fought hard to drive to your site.

Greg | SEO | Comments (0)