If you aren’t a baseball fan, or haven’t seen one of the hundreds of previews that seemed to accompany the movie’s release, then we can sum up the premise of Moneyball easily: Rather than sitting on established traditions, the general manager of a small-market team decided to evaluate players solely on statistics. The result was that the team won more games despite one of the lowest payrolls in Major League Baseball.

Doesn’t that sound a little familiar?

It should; small business owners, marketing managers, and e-commerce experts are fascinated with the idea of trying to get more out of less. Whether it’s working with niche retailing outlets or trying to squeeze high-impact marketing out of low-cost avenues like social networking, we are always looking for a better return on investment than what we’re getting right now. And yet, there’s always room for improvement, and there are always old patterns and ideas that seem to persist, even when they aren’t backed up by the numbers.

And so, the question is: Are you taking a Moneyball approach to your website?

Here are a handful of tips to help you get started on trying to get more for less:

Remember that you can’t use the numbers until you have them. Even though Google analytics, one of the most powerful pieces of metrics software out there, is freely available, a lot of companies don’t use it… or don’t use it to its full advantage. Get up close with the numbers behind your business website, because they’ll put you in a position to make better decisions.

Always build on what works first. Wherever you have found success in the past should be your starting point for future online marketing campaigns. Rather than throwing a big piece of your budget in something that might not work, put the biggest piece of it into what you know will be successful, and then experiment with the rest.

Set a time limit for any new idea to show a profit. Sometimes, you have ideas that you just know will be profitable in your business someday, but it’s getting hard to figure out when that day is ever going to arrive. Even slower-moving marketing tools like search engine optimization and social media marketing should be evaluated on a given timeline, even if it’s six months or a year down the road. Otherwise, you could keep pouring money into something that’s never going to show a profit.

Question anything that you don’t know to be true for your business or industry. Believe it or not, there are businesses that survive, and thrive, without things like SEO or an online newsletter, and others that couldn’t survive without them. Because every business and industry is different, make a point of questioning anything you don’t absolutely know can be successful and keep a close eye on the metrics.

Life isn’t often like the movies, but when you’re looking to get the most out of your business website, following the Moneyball strategy isn’t a bad way to go.

CONTENT–the most important piece of the pie. What good is having great code and a bunch of links if you end up on a website with poorly written content or no content at all?

Okay, let’s dig a little deeper. So everyone knows you need content that relates to your business, products and services. And most people even know that you should have keywords in the content so search engines can find you. Well, yes, but there’s a bit more to it than dumping keywords on your site. They need to be strategically placed.

For example, which one of these sentences read better:

Brew City Marketing is a Web Design company in Milwaukee.

Brew City Marketing Web Design Milwaukee.

The one that is grammatically correct, obviously. If your content can maintain a solid and easy-to-read flow, it is more likely to create a better response from the end user.

So, how does this translate into better rankings? Well, most search engines rank content on how users react to it. If users find your website often, but don’t spend a lot of time clicking around, you will not rank as highly. Google uses its own analytics report to identify these trends and a website with good conversions and low page turnover will get a boost in rankings over a website with good conversions and high page turnover.

So it makes sense to focus on good, well written content so that the search engines find you, and the end users identify with you!

Brew City Marketing focuses on onsite SEO strategies and developing good content focused on users and how they will interact on your website.

Unlike other marketing methods, text messages are:

o Typically read within 15 minutes of receipt
o Redemption rates are 12-30% compared to only 1-1.5% for direct mail!
o Measurable
o Targeted
o Permission Based
o Immediate

It takes some creativity and hard work to build your list but the ROI is worth it. If you’d like to learn how to integrate text messaging into your marketing strategy, contact Brew City Marketing today! 414-208-0700

A good way for a website to overcome this obstacle is to increase its number of backlinks. Backlinks are links on other websites that point to your website. Search engines often count a website’s backlinks to help determine its search engine ranking, popularity and importance.

Brew City Marketing employs a variety of SEO techniques to increase the number of backlinks to your site. However, the challenge lies in identifying
where and how to obtain these backlinks. Simply building a backlink isn’t enough–it needs to have a high page ranking (PR) while relating to your niche market.

Sometimes, the best backlinks are free to build (time consuming, but free), while other backlinks are bought. Brew City Marketing obtains backlinks in both manners. There are certain local websites that search engines recognize as “authority websites”–sites that hold more sway when identifying backlinks. This is a great example of how we intend to develop our clients.

Each month, as part of our SEO strategy, Brew City Marketing will create more backlinks for your website throughout the internet, making your site more relevant on Google, Yahoo, Bing and other major search engines.

If you would like to discuss our strategies call Brew City Marketing 414-208-0700

Brew City Marketing uses both On-Site and Off-Site SEO strategies to help your website rank higher in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s). On-site SEO is any work that we do to your physical website. Off-site SEO is work that we do on other websites that will increase your ranking.

From time to time, the search engines change their algorithms and assign different criteria factors with the goal of making their search results more relevant to your query. When this happens, Brew City Marketing updates your code to be in compliance.

To ensure that your website is up to date with all current “best practices,” our On-Site SEO includes enhancing the following items on your website:

Alt tags
Assign keywords for all images on each page of the website
Image titles
Reverse redirect images to Google-Image search
Abstract meta tags
Add a generalization of your webpage into your page header
Classification keywords
Assign primary and secondary classification to your keywords
Robots.Google
Allows Google to crawl the webpage every 3 days
Pagerank tag
Increases overall pagerank
Serp tag
Combines meta tag and title tag for search engine results page
Subject tag
Declares the subject title of each page
Meta Keywords
Keywords related to business and services

If you need help optimizing your website for the search engines so that you can be found on Google, Yahoo, and Bing, CALL US TODAY! 414-208-0700

Your logo is important part of your marketing strategy. We’ve created logos for all industries. Take a look at our online graphic design portfolio to see more!

Ultimately an effective web site improves returns on all other marketing activities and should be well integrated with these efforts. To ensure your website has the basics covered, we’ll help you answer these questions:

1. Is your site simple to understand and easy to navigate?
2. Does it load quickly?
3. Is it relevant and focused on customer information?
4. Does it provide customers with an easy way to contact you?

Your website is up 24/7 and it represents you to your customers and prospects when it is convenient for them – when they look up your company the week after a trade show, find your business card in their wallet or hear about you through a referral. Therefore, your web site should be a simple, high-quality manifestation of your company, always working on your behalf, providing clients with information and making sales.

Your website conveys the essence of your company. For instance, if you have a product-based business selling merchandise online, your site is every bit as important as your physical store, and requires the same level of care an attention. If you have a service company, then your site becomes an extension of your sales force, and should communicate the same standards of excellence that you’d deliver in person.

Brew City Marketing will create a website that attracts and retains your customers’ attention and guide visitors through their decision-making process.

Collecting and interpreting this data is known as web analytics and there are a number of basic metrics you can use to track your success. However, before you even implement your campaign – let alone measure it – it’s important to be clear on the goals for your site and have a solid understanding of your target audience. Your bottom line may be to drive sales and revenue, but your web site can also contribute to lead generation, building a community around your business or generating brand awareness and PR, and you can set up your site to track any interim goal.

Every month, Brew City Marketing emails your Website Analytics report. You can easily extract some common measures of site performance such as:

Hits

Each file downloaded from your site is known as a hit. Files can include images, scripts and anything else the web browser needs to allow a user to view the page. If, for example, your homepage contains four photos and an HTML file, five hits to your site will be recorded, even though only one user has visited your page. As a result, hits are not a reliable measure of visitors to your site.

Unique Visitors

You can get a more accurate measure of who is coming to your site by looking at the number of unique visitors.

Page Views

Each time a visitor comes to your site, you can find out how many pages are looked at – the number of page views. This is more a useful measure of activity that can tell you how deeply your visitors engage with the various areas of your site.

Referrers

The sites from which your visitors arrive. This is an easy way to measure the effectiveness of your Search Engine Marketing strategy. If you need more detailed analysis such as understanding the paths, or routes within your site that customers are taking before they make a purchase, a more active measurement, known as page tagging, may be appropriate.

Brew City Marketing helps you determine a balance between using website analytics as long-range check on the direction of your site and a day-to-day tactical tool.

Ultimately an effective web site improves returns on all other marketing activities and should be well integrated with these efforts. To ensure your website has the basics covered, we’ll help you answer these questions:

1. Is your site simple to understand and easy to navigate?
2. Does it load quickly?
3. Is it relevant and focused on customer information?
4. Does it provide customers with an easy way to contact you?

Your website is up 24/7 and it represents you to your customers and prospects when it is convenient for them – when they look up your company the week after a trade show, find your business card in their wallet or hear about you through a referral. Therefore, your web site should be a simple, high-quality manifestation of your company, always working on your behalf, providing clients with information and making sales.

Your website conveys the essence of your company. For instance, if you have a product-based business selling merchandise online, your site is every bit as important as your physical store, and requires the same level of care an attention. If you have a service company, then your site becomes an extension of your sales force, and should communicate the same standards of excellence that you’d deliver in person.

Brew City Marketing will create a website that attracts and retains your customers’ attention and guide visitors through their decision-making process.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is the section on Google (also, Yahoo, and Bing) that says “sponsored advertising.” This section is usually on the top of the search page and to the right. PPC Advertisers bid on keywords and pay for clicks. With PPC, you can manage your own campaign, or you can contract with an agency that provides this service for you.

PPC is one of two places that you can appear on Google. The other section is called Organic (also called SEO (search engine optimization)). This section includes the “Maps” as well as any results below the map section. There are many factors that the search engines look at when ranking websites in the SEO section. Among them is good website content, good code, registration of your maps page, and back links, to name a few.

PPC represents approximately 25% of all clicks on Google. On the flip side, SEO represents 75% of all clicks on Google, according to EMarketer.com. That’s a big difference. More people look at the SEO than at PPC. So logic would tell you that the best place for your business to appear is in the SEO (organic) section of Google. However, according to SEOmoz.org, only 10% of all online marketing dollars are being spent in the SEO section of Google. That’s right, 90% of businesses who advertise online are spending money in the PPC section.

So why are most businesses spending their advertising dollars in PPC if SEO has that much more traffic potential. First, PPC is immediate. With PPC, you can get ranked on page (1) of Google in a matter of days. SEO sometimes takes months to rank a client on page (1). Also important to note is that most large internet marketing companies don’t offer SEO as a service. It’s easier to sell PPC, because it’s immediate, and advertisers want immediate results. These companies have large sales forces that make a lot of calls, and sell a lot of advertising. This is why there is such a large disparity of dollars being spent on PPC vs. SEO, even though SEO is more important to long term internet success than PPC.

Any good internet marketing company understands the importance of SEO, and if your internet marketing company is not talking to you about SEO, you owe it to yourself to find a company that can get you in position to yield the highest potential traffic available to you online. This section is SEO and it’s very important to long term internet marketing success.

o 34% of people go online to search a business, product, or service (higher than any other medium).
o Google is the number one search engine (75% of all search engines online)
o 90% of all clicks on Google are in the SEO section

If you have more questions, please give Brew City Marketing a call to discuss.