A good place to start is Google Places. Google Places is Google’s own, integrated yellow pages, and it syncs up with other Google products such as maps and photos. Creating a content rich, keyword rich Google Places page is a great way to let search engines know where you are as well as make your business available to be found by potential customers in your area.

Other places to set up a local page for your business include:

• Yahoo Local
• Bing Local
• Foursquare
• Yelp
• Better Business Bureau
• Squidoo

When creating local pages, it is important to prominently feature your address, phone number, e-mail and a link to your main website.  You will also want to upload your own pictures, so you can control the image of your business. Otherwise, photos may be added by the service, such as the street view from Google Maps.

Customer reviews on local pages are important as well. Customer reviews keep your pages fresh and active and are great word-of-mouth promotions for your business. However, not all reviews will be positive, and using a negative review to start a dialogue with the customer will be better PR for your business than ignoring or deleting it. Much like social media, reviews allow for open forum communication between your business and your customers. Apologizing and offering a resolution to any issues can turn negative comments into positive promotions for your business’s customer service.

Other great outlets to promote your business locally are coupon sites like Groupon and Living Social. Not only do you get great exposure, but you also get paying customers. Most coupon sites work by taking a percentage from each coupon sold, so there is no up front cost and little financial risk if few coupons are sold.

Social media pages, geo-targeted SEM campaigns and mobile optimized webpages (WAP) will also influence your local search visibility.  However, the first step to capitalizing on local search is to create a local page with each of the major search engines. Though setup is usually easy, monitoring local pages can be time consuming, and many businesses choose to employ online marketing firms to develop and manage their social dialogues.

Define Your Conversion Goal

The first step to mapping out your conversion funnel is to determine your conversion goal. An online conversion goal is an action you want visitors to take on your website. For ecommerce sites the goal is easy: make a sale. Non-ecommerce sites will have different conversion goals. To determine your conversion goal, ask yourself, “What do I ultimately want visitors to do on my website?” For example, you may want visitors to sign up for your newsletter or fill out a contact form.

Create Your Conversion Funnel

Your conversion funnel will track a user’s journey through your site to your conversion goal. Here’s an example of a simplified conversion funnel for an ecommerce site:

1)   A person visits your website

2)   That visitor put an item into their online shopping cart

3)   The visitor clicks “Check Out”

4)   The visitor enters all of their shipping information and clicks onto your secure payment page

5)   The visitor enters all of their credit card information and clicks “buy”

Steps 1-4 are all micro-conversions. A micro-conversion is a small conversion that a consumer performs to get to the main conversion goal, or the macro-conversion. In this example, clicking “buy” is the macro conversion. To determine your conversion funnel, go through your website as if you were a visitor and note the steps you must take to reach your conversion goal.  It is also beneficial to have someone, who has never been to your site, navigate to your conversion goal. PHX Media Labs offers a free conversion optimization evaluation of your landing page or web page. A professional web page analysis can help you identify some of the dropout areas in your conversion funnel as well as other issues affecting your conversion rates.

Track Your Conversions

Now that you have determined your conversion goal and conversion funnel, you can start tracking visitors on your site. Visitor tracking will tell you where users drop out, and you can start optimizing your website and improving your conversion rates. There are several analytics and tracking tools available. Google Analytics is one of the most popular. Google Analytics allows you to easily calculate your conversion goal metrics, customize reports, isolate traffic segments, and much more. Other useful tracking applications include heat maps, scroll maps and confetti reports. Crazy Egg offers these services as well as a free 30-day trial for their heat map tool.

For an example, we have simplified the tracking data for our conversion funnel, and we can see that visitors are dropping out at each micro-conversion.

1)   100 people visit your website

2)   50 put an item into their online shopping carts

3)   30 click “Check Out”

4)   20 enter all of their shipping information and click onto your secure payment page

5)   10 enter all of their credit card information and click “buy”

Determine Why Your Customers are Dropping Out

To find out why customers drop out at every micro-conversion, we need to take a look at those sections of the website. Here are some questions to ask when looking at your micro-conversions.

1) 100 people visit your website:

• Where is the traffic coming from (PPC ad, display ad, email promotion, social media campaign, etc.)?
• What page of your website are visitors landing on?
• Is the page relevant to the visitor? For example, if your PPC ad says “red cocktail dresses” and customers are directed a page containing blue jeans, the page is not relevant to the customer.

2) 50 put an item into their online shopping carts:

• Is there a clear call to action, such as a “buy now” button, for the visitor to take the next step in your conversion funnel?
• Would moving the call to action or button produce more conversions?

3) 30 click “Check Out”:

• Is your “check out” button easy to see?
• Can the customer easily access your shopping cart and checkout process from the product pages?

4) 20 enter all of their shipping information and click onto your secure payment page:

• Are there unnecessary or confusing steps in your checkout process?
• Can the checkout process be simplified?
• Are the checkout steps displayed, so customers know how many steps are in the checkout process and which step they are on?

5) 10 enter all of their credit card information and click “buy”:

• Are shipping and taxes calculated, so consumers know exactly what they will pay before they reach the final payment stage?
• Is there an easy to read summary of all products, taxes, fees, shipping and billing addresses, and total cost on the final page?
• Is the final step clear, such as a “complete purchase” button?

Test. Improve. Test Again.

Conversion rate optimization is a process, and optimizing your conversion funnel for maximum conversions will take testing, time and patience. It is best to make one or two changes at a time, and gather data over a few weeks or even months (depending on your website’s traffic flow). Making a “buy now” button bigger or changing its location on the page may boost conversions or it may not have any effect. If you make too many changes at once, you may not know which changes were effective and which were not.

Conclusion

Understanding the ways in which visitors interact with your website is vital to your business’s success. You can gain invaluable user data by implementing analytics and tracking visitor behavior within your conversion funnel. However, it takes time and continuous optimization to reach and maintain high conversion rates and ROI for your business.

Keywords play many roles in your web-presence. They are the words and phrases that run your SEM campaigns and boost your website’s page rank on search engines. However, your keywords must be relevant to a user’s search for products, services or information. So how do you determine which keywords and phrases are relevant to your potential customers?

1. Utilize Google Auto Fill

You’ve noticed how Google tries to guess what you are typing when you use the search bar. Many of us find this helpful when we don’t know how to spell a word, but this feature can also be used to see what common searches are related to a certain word or phrase like your company name. For this example let’s say we own a camera store. We type “camera” into Google and see what auto fills.

The results show us popular searches related to camera reviews and accessories. These searches give us a good starting point for our keywords. For instance, we can expand on “camera bags” by including the brand or sizes of camera bags we carry. The more specific we can make our keywords, the more relevant they will be to our target audience.

2. Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Another great resource is Google’s AdWords keyword tool. Using the camera store example again, we type “cameras” in the “word or phrase” box. You will notice advanced options and filters to narrow your search, but we will do a basic search to start.

In the results below, you can see some of the most searched keywords include brand names such as Cannon and Nikon, types of cameras such as digital and photography, and questions such as which video camera.

3. Mix and Match using the AdWords Keyword Tool

Now let’s take some of the keywords from the AdWords tool and search again. We type in “digital cameras” this time, and the results…

The keywords are getting more specific, and we can use these results to expand our keyword list. “Digital Camera Review” for example, is a search with 246,000 global monthly searches. This means that each month 246,000 people type that phrase into Google, and those people are potential customers for our camera site! However, the competition for this keyword is high, which means our competitors are bidding on this word too. The key is to keep playing around with words and phrases until you find the right combination to reach your target audience, stay within your budget and run against the right competition.

4. See What Ads Are Displayed for Keywords

Click on any of the blue keywords displayed in the results to see a selection of the ads currently showing for that keyword on Google. This will reveal some of your competition for that keyword as well as give you ideas for related keywords.

In this example, we clicked on “digital camera.”

You can see Amazon and Sam’s Club are top competitors for this keyword. Other words used in their ads include, “10 Top Digital Cameras,” “Canon” and “SLR.”  We now know who our major competition for this keyword is as well as other keywords the competition is using.

5. Competitor Research

Competitor websites are also good places to get ideas. You can visually scan a competitor’s site and see what keywords, phrases and images are used, or you can utilize keyword tools such as SEO Quake. SEO Quake is a free ad-on for your web browser that displays the keywords for a webpage, including the Meta Data. These types of tools prove to be extremely useful for industry and competitor research. Below is a selection of the SEO Quake keyword density report for www.bhphotovideo.com.

Since B&H supplies professional photography equipment, not all of their keywords will be relevant to our store; however, the keywords in the copy as well as the Meta keywords (displayed in the column on the right) give us some additional ideas for our keywords: lighting, portable and camcorders are all new keywords avenues for us to explore.

Finally, it is important to note that keyword strategy does not stop at the ad campaign. You have to incorporate those keywords in your landing pages and website. Aside from boosting SEO, including your keywords on your landing pages will improve the performance of your SEM campaigns. Google uses a number of factors to determine your keyword’s quality score, including landing page relevance. Therefore, it is important to link your campaigns to the most relevant content on your website.

Conclusion:

Creating successful ad campaigns and SEO strategy starts with developing relevant keywords. There are many free, online resources that you can utilize to determine the most relevant keywords for your business, and some businesses choose to employ online marketing firms to help develop prosperous keyword strategies. Plus, online marketing gives you the flexibility to try, test and improve. You can implement your keywords, measure their effectiveness and adjust for enhanced performance. The continual optimization of your online presence to reach and maintain maximum conversion rates is the foundation of Conversion Rate Optimization and PHX’s Cybertising™ methodology.

In Winning the Zero Moment of Truth Lecinski writes, “Shoppers are digging up more information, from more sources, before they buy.” This fact is the basis for ZMOT™. People are using the Internet as their primary research tool. They gather information by visiting company websites, reading reviews, posting on forums and blogs, talking to their Facebook friends and reviewing competitor websites. ZMOT™ is the decision point when a person shifts from researching a product to buying a specific product. Therefore, it is extremely important that your business is visible during the research process.

Lecinski drives this point home when he says, “If you’re not visible online when people are doing that homework, believe me, they’ll find others who are.”

Our Cybertising™ framework refers to this visibility as your web-presence, and it is much more than the homepage you survived with during the 90’s. Your web-presence is comprised of all the digital aspects your business should have in place, including your corporate website, social media pages, blogs, pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, search engine optimization (SEO), offline marketing and advertising campaigns, search engine rankings and more. However, successful digital marketing is more than just plastering your business across the web without a sense of direction. Successful online marketing is achieved through creating integrated campaigns that drive targeted traffic to your optimized websites with the highest possibility for creating valuable conversions.

So, how do you know where your business’s web-presence stands, and what can you do to bridge the gap between consideration and loyalty?

In our response to the ZMOT™ reality, Cybertising™ recommend businesses just venturing into online marketing ask themselves the following questions:

• What appears in the search result page when you type your business name into the search bar of a search engine (such as Google or Bing)?
• When you start typing your product name into a search engine, what terms automatically fill in the search bar?
• Does any part of your company’s web-presence (i.e. website, landing page, PPC ad, etc.) appear on the search results page?
• What kind of keywords (the terms people enter into a search engine to find what they want) are your clients searching for?
• Who are your competitors?
• What are your competitors doing online?
• What kind of keywords are your competitors bidding on?
• How are your competitors capturing new clients and promoting their online presence (are they utilizing PPC ads, display networks, etc.)?
• What kind of content and copy is on your competitors’ websites?
• Where does your company stand in comparison to the competition?

These questions allow you to determine the scope of your online presence and develop online marketing strategies using real, quantifiable market information.

As a company tackling the changing marketing dynamics addressed by Google’s ZMOT™, you may consider implementing Cybertising™ at every level of your web-presence in order to make information easily accessible to your consumers throughout their consideration cycle. You should also be thinking about online and offline marketing initiatives as well as performing an in-depth analysis of your business’s industry, your web-presence and your competition.

Google’s Jim Lecinski, author of “Winning at the Zero Moment of Truth,” and John Ross from Shopper Sciences recently performed a study analyzing the way people buy, how the buying process has changed in the digital age and what this means for marketers.  From this study the concept of ZMOT™ (Zero Moment of Truth) was born, which explains how consumers, empowered by the Internet, mobile, social media and unlimited access to an array of information, have changed advertising and marketing dynamics. ZMOT™ illustrates the current state of consumer behavior and how marketers must adapt to this shift in the sales cycle.

At PHX we are very excited about ZMOT™, because it mirrors the online marketing model we coined, trademarked, developed and polished known as Cybertising™. Cybertising™ is the implementation of ZMOT™ on all marketing fronts with the goal of putting your business in the right place, at the right time with the appropriate message in front of the right consumer.

Google’s recognition of ZMOT™ validates our Cybertising™ methodology and confirms the marketing beliefs we have promoted for years. If you have not heard about ZMOT™, it basically adds a step to the original sales model: Stimulus, the FMOT (First Moment of Truth) and the SMOT (Second Moment of Truth).  ZMOT™ falls in front of the FMOT and refers to the ways people utilize digital technology to find information about the products they are going to purchase. Since the Internet and mobile technologies have made information immediately accessible from almost anywhere, companies must offer information and real value online to bridge the gap in a consumers shopping mind and lead them down a sales or conversion funnel. In short, consumers today are much more demanding and expect to be informed about what’s in your product, how it is made, how it compares to other products, how it affects the environment, what people are saying about it and beyond.

Google and their search engine’s capabilities are mainly responsible for creating the ZMOT™, and Cybertising™ is our response and solution to this reality. As a marketer being introduced to this idea for the first time, you may be a little overwhelmed. Everything you know or have been taught about marketing has shifted. You’re now thinking about restructuring your marketing strategies again and analyzing what you are already doing to reach customers through online technology, including mobile and social. Marketing has never been as fragmented as it is today, and, as a decision maker, you must consider how to implement these new technologies to your benefit and how to allocate funds to these projects efficiently. Cybertising™ addresses all of these concerns and streamlines the process by providing a roadmap for your digital marketing success.

Our e-book, Cybertising™ in a Digital Economy, shares many of the same findings as Google’s Winning the Zero Moment of Truth. However, PHX takes the next step and focuses on applying these findings toward successful digital marketing strategies through the cohesive integration of online media along with your business strategy.

Read Part II in our series: Cybertising™ & The Implementation of ZMOT™ for Your Business Success in a Digital Economy: ZMOT™ & Your Web-Presence 

At PHX Media Labs we share Google’s belief in the importance of search for any online and offline business, and our proprietary Cybertising™ methodology reflects many of the digital marketing strategies and best practices addressed in the Zero Moment of Truth. To learn more about the integration of Cybertising™ and ZMOT™, checkout our seven-part blog series: Cybertising™ & The Implementation of ZMOT™ for Your Business Success in a Digital Economy.

Let’s start by saying; you shouldn’t blog with the sole purpose of increasing your search engine rank. Blogs are for your customers and patrons. So, they should provide information, be entertaining, be an extension of your brand, etc. Blogs should not be boring, keyword stuffed promos for your business. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t create a great blog that also boosts your search visibility and brand credibility, which ultimately helps drive traffic to your website and increases conversion rates.

Blogs Boost SEO

We know that search engines, such as Google, like websites that actively update content, and a blog is a place to post new content on a regular basis. Plus, the simple URL structure is easy for spiders to crawl. Therefore, a good blog can really boost SEO for a business.

More than Text

Like most aspects of the Internet, blogs have evolved. Now, you can easily post pictures, audio and video in addition to your written content. Though these elements do increase your SEO and are a great way to engage readers, text is still the biggest contributor to your search engine page rank. So, be sure not to neglect your written content for audio and visual elements.

Developing Inbound Links

Did you know that blogs link to each other more than websites? So, if you are trying to increase your website SEO via inbound links, a blog is a good place to start. Inbound links to your blog and reciprocating outbound links will build your reputation and develop a community of readers. This community and reputation will spill over to your business. However, you must be active in building this community by consistently posting content as well as commenting on other related blogs.

Encourage Reader Comments

Reader comments help SEO by adding a new stream of original content to your blog as well as links. You also have an amazing opportunity to get feed back from your community. However, not all comments are good. You may get SPAM or followers that post inappropriate comments. You can either set all comments to be approved before they appear on your site, or you can monitor your site and delete any profanity or slander. We do not recommend deleting negative comments. Instead you should view them as an opportunity for improvement. If there is a complaint regarding your business, address it and see how it can be resolved. If people see you are willing to work with your patrons, the overall effect will be positive.

Now that you know the why, here are some other resources to help you create a blog that benefits your readers and SEO:

Where to Use Keywords in Corporate Blog Posts

The Blogger’s Guide to SEO – by Aaron & Giovanna Wall

Research

More and more people are going online to research products, companies, and services before they actually make a purchase. In 2011, Google released a study on the way people use the Internet during the decision making process called Winning the Zero Moment of Truth. Google emphasizes that your company needs to be present in search, so customers can find your products and services before they are ready to make a purchase. Here’s why:

- Finding the Right Product

Search is all about matching relevant information with the user’s needs, and many people use search to find the right product as opposed to purchasing a similar, and even less expensive, product. This means you have to let the consumer know about your products and services via PPC ads, display ads, local search visibility, shopping networks, as well as mobile optimized web pages for those customers searching via smartphones and tablets.

- Price Comparison

Everyone wants to get the best deal, and search gives consumers the power to easily compare products from a range of sellers. Utilizing shopping networks, PPC ads and display ads to promote your products is a great way to get people to visit your store. It is a good idea to include prices in your ads, this way people can immediately see where your prices stand in comparison of the competition. Wording such as, “Gadgets from $9.99” gives the consumer an indication of the cost of your product.

Including prices also has the added benefit of making your ad more relevant to the consumer. This means that only those customers interested in paying $9.99 for a gadget will click on your ad. By reaching a more targeted audience, your bounce rates will decrease and your ROI will increase.

- Online Coupon Codes

Shoppers will take the extra five or ten minutes to search for a coupon code. Free shipping or 10% off could be the difference between you getting the sale over your competitor. Advertisings online coupon codes in PPC ads or making your coupon codes easily accessible via online search are great ways to increase your search visibility.

Time Saved

Search is fast. You can type any word or phrase into a search engine and get hundreds if not thousands of different results. For this reason, employing search engine optimization (SEO) strategy for organic website ranking is also very important. You want your website to appear on the first page, ideally within the top three results, for searches related to your major keywords, and you want your site to rank first for your company name. For example, we did a Google search for PHX Media Labs.

PHX Media Labs Google Results

As you can see, the main website ranks first, a recent press release ranks second and the LinkedIn profile ranks third. These search result ranks are achieved through developing keyword rich content for our website, social media pages, press releases and all aspects of our web-presence as well as creating a site structure that is easy for the Google Robots and Spiders to crawl and index.

Raised Awareness

Search can also be used to promote your business through SEM campaigns including PPC, display and remarketing ads. Even if users don’t click on your ads, they see your branding and company name, and you can begin to build relationships with future customers before they ever visit your website.

- Remarketing

Remarketing uses “cookies” to track user’s online browsing behavior, and, after a user visits your website, you can use that information to display banners ads to them on other web pages. Here’s an example of a remarketing ad for PHX Media Labs:

Remarketing is a great way to remind customers about your company, products and services throughout their research process, keeping your business at the customer’s top-of-mind.

Conclusion:

In order to reach customers during the research and decision-making stages of the purchasing process, your company must be visible in search through both SEM and SEO strategies. There are many approaches your business can take to be visible on search including PPC campaigns, display ads, remarketing, shopping networks, local search, mobile marketing and SEO. Businesses with successful marketing plans utilize most if not all of the aspects of search engine marketing and search engine optimization.