Is SEO the New PR?

31 March 2018 by Taylor Reaume

Way back before the internet had even been invented, companies hired PR firms to get their name out, build a brand name reputation, and help prospective customers learn about them. Public relations professionals would dutifully go about writing press releases, scoring feature stories, and negotiating product presentation opportunities in the name of finding more buyers.

Then the internet came along and everything changed. Press releases lost their power to serve as a news source because newspapers and magazines were folding. Feature stories weren’t read because they didn’t stand out in the sea of information. Product placement decreased in value because there were so many new ways of viewing content.

Fortunately, there is still a way of getting your name in front of prospects when they look for the product or service you offer. It’s called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. This is a way of formulating your website, blogs, and social media content to be responsive to online search queries. If someone uses Google to search for “hotels in Santa Barbara,” or “restaurants in Santa Ynez Valley,” you want your website to pop up on the first page of their results.

How to Blend SEO Into Your PR Efforts

Here are tips you can use to incorporate more SEO, increase your visibility in search engine results, and help the internet drum up more business for your business:

Make your website accessible: Search engines and potential customers need to be able to easily access your website. In addition to great content, you also want to get the technical parts right. You don’t want someone clicking to your website because you are the answer to their problem, only to get a “website not found” error. Check all pages for functionality, eliminate duplicate content, include title and H2 tags, and have a rich source of content.
Think about keywords: What do prospects search for when they need your product or service? Develop a list of words they might type into the search engine bar. If those words aren’t prominently included in your website copy, your site will not appear in their results. The content needs to be informative and natural; you can’t just add a list of keywords to the bottom of the page and hope it generates results. If there is a lot of competition in your field, incorporate plenty of terms which make your business stand out from the crowd.
Be a valuable resource: Look at your website as a potential customer might and ask yourself, “Does this help me?” You brought in somebody who searched for a particular term, so that had better appear right on your landing page. If you can’t see any benefits, then you’ve got some rewrites to do. Have content that is educational, helpful and easy to understand, and make sure it is current. There is nothing worse than navigating to a site that is chock full of old info. This effort helps prospects learn about you, and also signals the search engine algorithms that your site has something valuable to offer their users.
Provide a great website experience: Have a compelling website experience for your visitors. Most leave in seconds if they don’t think you can help, so have your prime selling proposition front and center. Make a clear learning path, avoid large blocks of content, and include helpful headlines that communicate key selling points. Include lots of pictures, graphics, and videos to quickly provide information. And make it easy to contact or buy from you.
Get social: Once your website strategy is in place, start bulking up your online presence through a concerted social media strategy. Have a Facebook page and Twitter account that offer useful information and drive visitors to your site. Provide the same branding experience across all outlets. This also increases the likelihood that the search engines will aggregate and incorporate additional contact opportunities for your company. Search results that include a website, Facebook page and LinkedIn page for a single company demonstrate a great deal of online flexibility. Use social media to encourage interaction and you’ll also boost search-ability.
Build more links: Search engines love it when other sites link to yours because this reflects your online credibility, but they can’t be random or low-quality links. Ask your current customers and contacts to link to your site if it makes sense for their business. You can provide reviews and referrals for complementary companies, and they can do the same for you. Bring in guest bloggers who will certainly link to your site from their blog, and you may even get organic links just because you have such helpful information in your blog. Make it easy for them by providing sample emails, tweets, or Facebook posts they can use to let others know more about you. You can also search for informative articles online and post comments on them that will introduce a new set of readers to your company.
Review sites: There are a number of online review sites that can help prospects find your business. You need to think in terms of Yelp, TripAdvisor, Open Table, Angie’s List, and other sites people go to gather insights. Initially, you just want to make sure they have the correct basic information such as address and phone number, but then you can ask your happiest clients to start posting reviews. If you’re in a more technical field, make sure your product specifications are included in industry sites.

If you’ve got a real news story, keep in mind that you can still generate PR with media outlets; it’s just moved online, too. If you’ve got a targeted customer base, check out your local media websites and look at ways you can provide news. They might have blogs or event calendars, or you might be able to email an editor or news director with a storyline about your business. SEO really can be the new PR for your company – you just need to know how to use it.

SEO Marketing | Web Marketing

IMAGE SEO & How To Correctly Name Your Photos

11 May 2017 by Taylor Reaume

SEO (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION) – THE PROCESS OF OPTIMIZING A WEBSITE TO GENERATE THE MAXIMUM NUMBER OF ‘ORGANIC’ (NON-PAID) VISITS FROM SEARCH ENGINES.

THE CORRECT WAY TO NAME YOUR PHOTOS FOR IMAGE SEO

The question on many photographers’ lips these days is: How do I get seen in a sea of similar websites?

Correctly naming your image files for optimal SEO, is a great way to start. Google can’t analyze the actual content of an image to tell what it is depicting, and whilst this technology is most certainly on the way, it’s nowhere near ready just yet. Instead, they rely on several indicators on a web page to tell them what the photo is all about. One of these is, as you might expect, the filename of the photo. You should never upload photos to your website with the standard camera-applied filename, like DSC_9764.jpg! This tells Google nothing at all and its content.

When Google knows more about the content of your image, it can include it in Image Search (click the image tab at the top of a Google search page), and sometimes the top images even show right at the head of a regular search page. Not only does it help people find your photos directly, but it also helps Google understand the content of the page that you posted the photo on, helping that page show up higher in regular search results for the subject.

DASH OR UNDERSCORE?

Instead of the default filename, you should be describing the contents of the image in 3-8 words. Importantly, you should be separating the words in your filename with a dash (hyphen), and not an underscore!

(THESE-ARE-DASHES)

(THESE_ARE_UNDERSCORES)

The inner workings of Google’s search engine algorithm are a closely guarded secret, but every now and again we get a little snippet of detail from one of their representatives on the Google Webmasters blog. For some reason there’s a lot of misinformation circulating around the web on this topic, but Google’s Matt Cutts, has clearly stated that dashes (hyphens) are the way to go on this one. Whilst Matt Cutts does say that the SEO difference between the two is relatively minor, that means there is a difference.

STRAIGHT FROM THE HORSE’S MOUTH – DASH NOT UNDERSCORE!

EXAMPLES

– WRONG -> DSC_9807.jpg

This tells Google nothing at all.

– WRONG -> blackcat.jpg

Blackcat is not a word.

– WRONG -> black-cat.jpg

Whilst this technically does describe the image (assuming it is actually a black cat), have a think about how many photos of a black cat you’d be putting yourself up against on the internet? Millions, I would imagine.

– WRONG -> a-black-cat-under-a-red-car.jpg

There’s no need to include stop words in your filename (a, the, it, to, etc.). Keep it short and simple.

– WRONG -> black_cat_under_red_car.jpg

Nope, the underscore isn’t a recognized word separator. To Google, this just reads as blackcatunderredcar.jpg! No good.

– CORRECT -> black-cat-under-red-car.jpg

Now we’re getting somewhere! Descriptive, and with the correct separators and no stop words.

USE IT TO YOUR ADVANTAGE

Since the filename helps Google understand the content of the page that the photo is on, you can use this to boost your search rankings for specific topics.

EXAMPLE

You are a wedding photographer from San Francisco and on the About page of your website, there is a headshot of you next to your biography.

WRONG -> joe-blogs-portrait.jpg

CORRECT -> joe-bloggs-san-francisco-wedding-photographer.jpg.

SHOULD YOU RENAME EXISTING IMAGES?

If you’re using a photo portfolio service like Photoshelter, SmugMug (get a 20% discount here), or Zenfolio, with hundreds or thousands of images, there’s little point renaming all of those files to make the names descriptive. There are obviously some organizational benefits to a photographer’s standard archive file naming scheme when photos are hosted in large volumes. Hopefully with these kinds of online portfolio archive services, you’re making use of all the other SEO options to optimize them.

The ideal setup is to use a blogging platform like WordPress, to create a new blog post every time you upload a new collection of images to your archive or online print store. In that blog post, you include a few of the images from the collection, and those are the images that you optimize with a proper name for SEO purposes. With properly optimized page content, and images, you’ll rank higher in more search results and bring people to the blog post. That’s when you can let them know that a full collection can be viewed on your archive site, or prints purchased from your print store.

But what if you’ve got existing blog images that weren’t correctly named? WordPress doesn’t natively offer a way to rename images, but you can use the plug Media File Renamer. What you have to remember, though, is that the filename is part of the direct URL to that image. If you do decide to change the filename, you’ll be altering the URL and it will reset any SEO juice that this image might have already gathered over time.

If you already have images that show up often in Google Image searches, you definitely don’t want to go renaming these ones. Choose wisely when tackling this question… my thought is that if you have a relatively new blog of only a few months old, you can rename the files with this plugin and probably get more long-term benefit from it than a short-term disadvantage. For older blogs, it’s probably not worthwhile.

SEO Marketing | Web Marketing

Increase Web Site Traffic with SearchEnginePros.com

2 February 2017 by Taylor Reaume

Increase Web Site Traffic with TheSearchEnginePros.com

A webmaster seeking to increase web site traffic faces many challenges in the age of the search engine — especially when attempting to find web marketing services to match his or her CMS system. Implementation of SEO for CMS based websites can be highly challenging. It is important that we find a reliable SEO Campaign Management Specialist to implement SEO for your websites.

Santa Barbara, CA – Today website development costs have reduced dramatically and launching a website has become just a breeze with all the free tools and open sources systems that are available. One of the latest open source systems that meet most requirements is Joomla. This is one of the most powerful and sophisticated open source systems. Businesses can launch robust websites in a matter of few clicks using the built-in tools available with Joomla. This saves a lot of development time to launch highly professional websites with fraction of the cost, and a webmaster can immediately increase web site traffic by deploying simple yet sophisticated Joomla plug-ins for additional site functionality. Besides the cost and time advantage, there are number of other advantages in using Joomla. However, along with these advantages comes an undeniable and critical disadvantage. There are many complications in terms of implementation of SEO for Joomla based websites.

Since the cost of website development has come down drastically and there is a great need to launch websites to promote one’s business online. Every day thousands of websites are launched. In such circumstances, one can easily get lost in the competition. Therefore, businesses need to promote their websites and increase website traffic, and one of the best ways of gaining visibility online is to implement search engine optimization. As noted already implementing SEO for Joomla-based websites presents special challenges. It requires a great level of experience to optimize Joomla-based websites. Not all web development companies are capable of developing an SEO Friendly CMS; only a company with search engine optimization experience can create SEO-friendly systems. Web development companies will be more concerned about creating functionally robust systems rather than being preoccupied with creating SEO-friendly CMS. Therefore, it is crucial that website owners find an SEO Campaign Management Specialist who can assist with Joomla Search Engine Optimization. Web marketing services capable of handling CMS natural search optimization are surprisingly rare given the popularity of such software.

One of the best places to go for Joomla Search Engine Optimization Tips and for SEO assistance is SearchEnginePros.com. They offer specialized web marketing services that will cater to all your search engine optimization needs and help you increase website traffic. They have the needed expertise to deal with Joomla Search Engine Optimization. They offer all types of web marketing services that will increase online popularity and targeted traffic to websites. There are hundreds of web marketing services online that promise to get website top rankings in Google and in other major search engines. Among these, only a fraction of search engine optimization companies meets their promises. This caused a lot of distrust among the website owners regarding SEO and web marketing services. The nature of web marketing is such that one cannot so easily guarantee results because there are too many variables that decide a website’s ranking and popularity. Only companies such as searchenginepros.com that have mastered the SEO concepts can produce the desired results. For more information on reliable SEO services visit,

searchenginepros.com

6 Marketing Strategies To Drive Thanksgiving Sales

24 November 2015 by Taylor Reaume

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the cornucopia of online marketing options available today. The truth is that a well thought-out and carefully implemented online marketing plan can open a business to a new stream of prospective customers, drive leads to a website and motivate increased sales. With that in mind, here are six search marketing strategies to be thankful for this Thanksgiving:

Event Marketing: Whether your business is holding a holiday sale or sponsoring a major conference, there is no better way to attract attention than online event marketing. Target a potential audience online and get them excited about your event.
Local Search: If your business caters to a particular geographic area, use local search strategies to become the big fish in your small pond. When customers in your target area search for a business or services similar to yours, your company should be at the top of their results.
SEO Marketing: Search engine optimization (SEO) studies how search engines rank their results and implements strategies to maximize exposure through this means. SEO marketing encompasses blogs, newsletters, website copy and design, and social media to drive higher rankings and awareness.
WordPress CMS: Efficiently manage your online content using WordPress CMS (Content Management System), which offers one convenient location for organizing web pages, blog content, and search marketing. WordPress Plugins allow you to easily extend the features and functionality of your blog or website. Thousands of customization options allow you to improve your search engine optimization, develop a client portal for private information, and add display features such as widgets or navigation bars.
Google Marketing: There are many ways to use Google’s SEO tools to increase your online visibility. Your business can run Google ads which are only shown to people who are searching for exactly what your company offers. It’s a great way to get big budget results with small budget costs.
Social Media: All of your prospects and customers are already using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media platforms every day. Your company can utilize social media marketing to engage with them every time they are online and become part of the conversation.

Your online marketing plan needs to take advantage of the most effective marketing tactics, and know which to gracefully avoid. Contact Search Engine Pros at 800-605-4988 and find out how wecan help your business compete more effectively online.

Happy Thanksgiving from Search Engine Pros!

Local Marketing | SEO Marketing | Web Marketing

Santa Barbara Marketing Made Easy

17 November 2015 by Taylor Reaume

Santa Barbara marketing firm with 100’s of testimonials…

If you are looking for Santa Barbara marketing services, Search Engine Pros are a local Santa Barbara marketing agency that helps local businesses generate awareness for their products and services. This article submits a few reasons why it is critical to start marketing your Santa Barbara, Ca web site.

Grow your web presence. One campaign at a time.

1. Over 81% of consumers are now making purchasing decisions online. What that means to small businesses marketing Santa Barbara, Ca web sites is that this work is no longer optional. It’s critical to find someone you can trust to help with online target marketing.

2. Higher traffic levels means more phone calls. More phone calls means more sales. More sales means more love and happiness. Well not exactly but you get the point. End result? A bigger bottom line and more revenue for your company. That’s what online target marketing is all about. Marketing Santa Barbara, Ca web sites is crucial in today’s fast moving e-business climate.

3. Marketing Santa Barbara, Ca web sites is an excellent idea because of the potential for recouping dollars spent on building traffic. Web marketing and seo are a long term investment. What is the first thing an investor considers when buying a web site? The traffic levels!

Santa Barbara Web Marketing Team Testimonials

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The SEO’s mission is to organize the client’s information and make it robotically accessible and profitable.

SEO is broken into two distinct buckets: “on page” factors and “off page” factors. On page factors include such items as: a website’s crawl-ability, internal linking, keyword selection and placement, meta tags, etc. Off page factors (which are far more important) include building link popularity (inbound links) into your website. There are over 250 factors that determine whether your website will rank on high on Google.

Marketing Santa Barbara, CA web sites via article marketing is likely to be one of the best strategies you can pursue. Article marketing is often referred to as educational marketing. If you have been looking into web site marketing, Santa Barbara, Ca – Search Engine Pros can help.

SEO Marketing | Web Marketing

6 Ways To Improve Your Web Site This Summer

21 June 2015 by Taylor Reaume

It’s summer in California and who wants to spend time worrying about websites when there is so much else to do? You’ve got Father’s Day, graduations, weddings, and backyard barbeques. But your web marketing strategy can’t wait until September unless you don’t mind letting your competitors steal all your customers! As a web marketing agency, Search Engine Pros develops websites that work hard all year long. Here are six things you can do this summer to improve your website performance and attract more customers:

Know Your Keywords: This is a crucial factor in search marketing Research your top ten keywords and provide title tags that include these words. This one step alone will capture the attention of the search engine “robots,” and could propel your site up the search engine rankings.
Update Your Content: Nothing kills rankings faster than stale, outdated content. Your SEO marketing strategy must include a constant stream of educational, topical, relevant information.
Use Great Photos: The old saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” is especially applicable with online marketing. Website visitors decide in seconds whether a site is worth perusing. Grab their attention and tell your story with dynamic photos, and they won’t be inclined to leave.
Build Inbound Links: Word-of-mouth and referrals are still two powerful means of attracting prospects. One sure way to build “authority” is to have other sites link to yours. Part of your marketing plan should include promoting non-competitive businesses on your site, and reaching out to them to reciprocate. It builds awareness for both companies, and helps each reach a new audience.
Offer Something: You never want to have someone visit your site and leave without making some type of connection. Your website should include a way to engage prospects and build that relationship. This could include an informational newsletter, a download of a “Top 10” regarding something that is pertinent to your business, a white paper, or some type of free sample or demonstration.
Make it Mobile: More and more consumers are using smartphones and mobile devices to search online. Top web design practices demand websites that are functional across all digital devices.

Your website is a strategic part of your online marketing plan. Spend some time this summer making sure yours is working hard, or contact Search Engine Pros and ask about our web marketing services.

SEO Marketing | Social Media Marketing | Web Marketing

Santa Barbara Social Media Marketing Made Easy

26 April 2015 by Taylor Reaume

Need help with your Santa Barbara social media marketing strategy?

Consumers now co-author the stories brands’ tell. Push is now pull and monologue is now dialogue.

Social Media is the newer, better, faster way to reach customers.

To grow your presence on the web, you need a smart social media marketing strategy. Many folks are turning to online marketing platforms to grow their business because over 81% of buyers make purchasing decisions online. As the web has grown and Google has become more sophisticated, the field of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has been merging with social media marketing, as well as traditional marketing, with emphasis on branding, framing, story telling, user engagement, viral marketing, and public relations. For example, Google is now crawling the Facebook Fan pages, which means that the words you use on social media have an impact on your SEO.

Did you know that the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is 40-60 years old? In the old days, we used to network in the coffee shops, nowadays, it’s all happening on social media sites. Social media sites are like personal newspapers of people’s lives. Some call it “lifestreaming”.

Smart companies are building massive emotional equity with social media sites. Educational marketing on these social sites, if executed properly (value adds, not pitches), will significantly boost your income.

Permission based marketing is more important than ever today. Boost your “likes’ and your “followers”, and you’ll boost your sales and profits.

Someone with experience in SEO, is someone who understands how people search for information (on the web and in other ways) and ensures that they or their clients are visible in the unpaid (organic) listings. A social media marketer is someone that ensures your business presence stays top of mind on social sites like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.

Get people to know, like & trust you!

Santa Barbara Social Media Marketing Made Easy

Q: Does a Santa Barbara social media marketing firm help with maintaining my Local Listings?

A: Santa Barbara social media marketing firms in general do not help with local listings. However, at Search Engine Pros, WE DO! Your social media manager will help build positive content on your local sites such as Google Local, Yelp and many others. Local Search enables users to find businesses and services within a specific geographic region. A Local Search Listing gives your business instant locally targeted exposure online. It’s important for your business to find a smart Santa Barbara social media manager that knows how to create and submit your Local Profile live to Google Maps, Yahoo Local Listings, Bing and YellowPages.com –many Santa Barbara social media manager falls short here. Submitting to local sites will help your business tap into local search engine traffic and deliver more potential customers in your local area. Local Search Optimization is an ongoing tasks that takes many months to start generating traction. In our Santa Barbara social media workshop, business owners report that the day they got into the number ranks on Google Plus Local was the day everything changed, and they started getting 5-10 calls per day.

Q: Does a Santa Barbara social media marketing firm help create social sites?

A. Yes. Your Santa Barbara social media manager will also help you create and optimize Social Sites like Facebook. There are a number of other social websites that your social media manager can create. By optimizing your content, you tell search engines which keywords are important to you. Search engines can only give your web page a high ranking for a certain keyword if your web page is relevant to that keyword. Make sure you have your target keywords in your titles, h1 tags, page URLs, metas, body area, breadcrumbs, and image alt tags.

Facebook and Twitter are in many respects becoming more important than your actual company web site these days. As search engine specialists, we’re helping you in a unique way with your social media strategy. We’re different because we think from the search engines perspective, and we know that it’s not enough to just have a compelling copy. Marketers create compelling copy. Create compelling copy that is optimized for both humans AND the search engines.

Q: Do Santa Barbara social media marketing campaigns increase the number of friends I have on Facebook and Twitter?

A. Yes. Your social media manager connects you to centers of influence in your industry, and adds value to them by retweeting their articles and doing other value adds. More twitter followers means more brand visibility and traffic. Your Social Media Manager posts niche related news articles on your twitter for you. More tweets = more viewership and traffic. Need to add Facebook Friends? No problem, we’ve got you covered. More facebook friends = more viewership and traffic.

Q: Do Santa Barbara social media marketing campaigns include DIGGS?

A. Yes. Your Social Media Manager will DIGG Your articles. Diggs are the most popular social bookmarks to have on your article. Digg.com is one of the social bookmarking sites that search engines pay attention to the most. They increase the popularity of your article which in turn increases rankings.

Q: Do Santa Barbara social media marketing campaigns include YOUTUBE optimization?

A. Yes, your Santa Barbara social media marketing manager will help you get more views and make comments on your Youtube Videos. Youtube is the 2nd largest search engine behind Google, and more Youtube votes increases your rankings in the Youtube Search Engine. This will in turn increase the popularity of your video and help to increase rankings.

Successful websites launch with 100 helpful articles In order to rank well on the internet’s largest search engines, you site must contain informative, original content that contains the relevant keywords from which you’d like to capture traffic. Part of the success of your business depends on your ability to generate top ranks on Google and other major search engines.

Get an entire marketing department for the price of a part time employee!

Santa Barbara Social Media Marketing Pros

Step 1. Design a web site that captivates, informs and motivates your target audience to take action.
Step 2. Develop an annual content publishing plan detailing specific steps to success.
Step 3. Delegate execution of the plan to a team that delivers a true return on investment.

Ready to get started? Inquire with Search Engine Pros today – your Santa Barbara Social Media Experts.

SEO Marketing | Web Marketing

7 Lucky Tips to Improve Your SEO

17 March 2015 by Taylor Reaume

St. Patrick’s Day is for the wearing o’ the green. While we like that, Search Engine Pros believes in the making o’ the green when it comes to implementing search marketing strategies for clients. We always tell clients that great SEO marketing isn’t a matter of luck. It’s a combination of knowledge, dedication, and persistence. As a web marketing agency, we’re providing these six lucky tips to help improve your search engine optimization:

Relevance: What you write on your blog must be relevant to the searcher’s keyword. Content optimization builds your site’s relevance. In addition to providing interesting content, it must be posted using meta tags, alt tags, headings and intrasite links.
Longer Content: Despite supposedly shorter attention spans, longer content of 1000-2000 words shows up well in search engine rankings and also serves to demonstrate your authority. The only caveat is that the piece must be of high quality, or you will waste your own time and that of your readers.
Back links: Search engines look for pages and sites that are connected to one another through links. This can be done by testimonials, reviews, blog comments and social media shares that let the search engines know that your site is respected by other web denizens.
Social Media Marketing: Your marketing plan should interweave SEO and social media to expand your online reach. Social media posts which point to relevant website information or blog posts increase the amount of shares and “likes” for existing content.
Build Relationships: Increase your trust factor by showing that others respect what you have to say. Over time, you will become more well-known by the company you keep in your link-building and social media strategies.
Authority: Good content attracts attention, but being relevant builds authority. With a high search engine ranking and high number of links, prospects will tend to trust your online business presence more.

Don’t just select one point and focus on that. Each of these must be combined into an all-in-one, connected, online marketing plan. Each area needs to be functioning smoothly so that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. You won’t need the luck to improve your SEO when you have Search Engine Pros as your marketing expert.

SEO Marketing | Social Media Marketing | Web Marketing

Accelerate Your SEO Marketing for Christmas Now

2 December 2014 by Taylor Reaume

By Taylor Reaume @ NOOZHAWK.COM

The holidays are right around the corner, which means that now is the time for companies to ensure that they have a marketing approach that is geared toward bringing in the most clients possible. Not only will having a tailored marketing approach this holiday season help you close out 2014 with a bang, but it’ll give you a big boost as you prepare to ring in 2015.

If you don’t know by now, marketing has changed drastically over the last few years. The emphasis on online marketing has quickly grown to be much more valuable than nearly any other advertising tool. In order to make online marketing work for your business, it all starts with your ability to be found through a search engine like Google.

You still have a few weeks until Christmas, but now is the prime time for consumer shopping online. Therefore, here are some ways that you can accelerate your SEO marketing for Christmas now, to ensure that you get the most amount of traffic that you can during this incredibly popular time of year.

Revamp Your Website

If you can’t find the perfect gift to give yourself this holiday season, look no further than your website. If it has been a while since you last updated your site, now is the time to make some very critical changes that will help you with search engine optimization.

There is a common misperception that just having a website is good enough to help you with your online presence and SEO listings. However, this isn’t the case. Instead, you need to ensure that your website is built with a strong foundation that will make it easier for viewers to find.

To improve the foundation of your website, make sure that URLs are cohesive and consistent, include valuable metadata, and work to keep everything organized along the way as you continue to build your website. Not only will putting in some effort on your website look better and be more cohesive, but it’ll also help it run faster as well. Google shows preference to websites that can load quickly, which is why it’s important that yours does just that.

If you’ve already invested in your website, you may not want to keep pouring money into it if it’s not working for you. However, you can rest assured knowing that your site is not something that should be overlooked, and instead it might be time for you to spruce things up. After all, the Internet isn’t going away, and revamping your website at the end of 2014 will have lasting positive benefits.

Create Holiday Content

Content is king when it comes to SEO results. Therefore, you want to ensure that you have creative and relevant content throughout your website. The more content you upload, the better your SEO results will be.

If you are having a hard time coming up with creative content this holiday season, it might be time for you to spruce up your blog. With a blog, you can write about anything that is relevant to your website, and this will help with SEO.

Since it’s the holiday season, be sure to include something about the holidays in your blog content. Not only does this keep things relevant and give you something to write about, but it’ll also get your viewers in the holiday spirit as they read your content.

Keep Things Consistent During Christmas

Consistency is key as you begin building your online presence with the hopes of dominating search engines. As you start to build up your website, be sure that URLs for your website are consistent.

Consistency will help you with your SEO rankings, but it also helps with cataloging your entire website. Google and other search engines require you to setup an XML site map, and they give priority rankings to websites with a consistent internal linking structure. The truth is that requirements for search engines are always changing, and a more organized website will make it easier for you to make adjustments in the future.

Do yourself a favor and start with consistent cataloging now, and you’ll have a much easier time with marketing your website in the New Year as well.

Consider Christmas Keywords

As a business owner, it can be hard to see things from the perspective of customers and clients. To dominate SEO marketing during the Christmas season, however, this is exactly what you’ll have to do.

Sure, there are plenty of fancy programs out there that will help you with keywords, and many of them are worth investing into. However, if you are on a budget with your business, you only have to think like a consumer to find relevant keywords.

To help accelerate your SEO marketing, consider the keywords and phrases that you believe your clients will be looking for. In doing so, you’ll notice more hits and traffic to your website.

Spread The Holiday Cheer

2014 was a huge year for social media, and you can expect things to only become more dependent on this type of media in 2015. Therefore, be sure that you take the time during the holidays to improve your overall social media influence.

If you aren’t using your social media profile for your business, you are missing out on a big opportunity to draw in new clients. Your social media profile can also help you with improving your image and the perception that customers have of your brand by interacting with them on a regular basis.

Finally, as you also look to improve your social media presence for SEO this holiday season, also be sure to make your website easier to share. If you can easily share your site through your social media links, you’ll notice an increase in views from your followers online.

The year is almost over, so now is your chance to end 2014 with a bang. Consider these tips to help you accelerate your SEO marketing for Christmas. If you do so correctly, you’ll also be happy with the benefits you’ll get after the New Year as well.

Facebook Marketing | Local Marketing | SEO Marketing | Social Media Marketing | Web Marketing

Get Your Online Marketing Plan Ready For The Holidays

27 November 2014 by Taylor Reaume

Can you believe it? The holiday season is here, though it seems like 2014 just started. From the team here at Search Engine Pros, we’d like to take a moment to wish you a happy Thanksgiving, and a prosperous and safe holiday season.

For the companies out there, you likely know that it’s time that you start planning for holiday marketing. With an economy that is finally back on an upswing, it’s expected that this could be a record quarter for sales as we finish out the year. That is why it’s important that your business has a dedicated web presence this holiday season. If you don’t, then you’ll be missing out on valuable clients and an increase in customers during a golden time of year to do so.

If your current online campaign is leaving you with something more to be desired, then there is no time to waste. With a search marketing team on your side, you’ll be able to get back in the game and earn more recognition for your company.

When it comes to working with a web marketing company for the first time, you may not be familiar with what to expect. Here are some of the services that an online marketing team will provide you with.

A Personalized Website = 24/7 Employee

First impressions mean everything when it comes to your online presence. That is why it’s imperative that you have a fully personalized website that makes a lasting impression on your clients.

In order to implement a personalized website, you’ll need a marketing group that can provide you with top web design ideas. Your web design needs to be something that works best for you and that really shows off your company’s personality.

In addition, your website should also be optimized for future growth as well. The internet is always changing and the way people look for information is as well. Therefore, your web marketing approach should include a strategy to ensure that your site will last for years to come.

By building trust with your customers through your website, your marketing plan will be much more effective to build from.

A Diverse Marketing Plan

Having just a website isn’t going to be enough to get the type of sales that you are looking for. It’ll help, but you’ll also need a diverse marketing plan that uses a variety of different methods.

With an SEO marketing plan, you’ll be able to rank higher in search engine results provided by Google, the largest search engine on the web. With social media marketing, you can target customers on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and more. Email marketing and list building are also essential elements to your long term success. The more that you build as an online presence, the more successful your marketing approach will be. Keep this in mind as you look for a marketing agency to assist you, and make sure that they have a comprehensive approach.

Diligent Customer Care

Working with a marketing service that you can trust will hopefully go well right out of the gate and everything will be smooth. But because we all know that business has plenty of variables, you never know what’s going to happen. That’s why it’s important to work with an agency that promises diligent customer care. There is no telling what obstacles that you may come across, which is why it’s vital that you work with a team that is ready to take on additional challenges with you. A reputable marketing company will evaluate what is working and what is not, and then help you make adjustments accordingly to better implement your strategy.

As the year comes to a close, we’ve had the chance to look back and realize how grateful we are and how much we appreciate everyone who has supported the growth of Search Engine Pros over the years. Many, many thanks to our wonderful clients for your continued trust in our team. Thank you to our dedicated staff for your exceptional focus, drive and determination. Your contributions make a real difference every year.

Q: Why is web marketing more important than traditional marketing during the holidays?
A: Black Friday was once thought to be something that was worth going out for in order to get great deals on things. However, with so much chaos that ensues every time, people are now starting to opt for more online purchases. That is why you need to ensure that you are online for people to find when they are looking for ways to beat Black Friday madness.
Q: Why is web marketing a better investment than physical mailers or advertisements?
A: When you use web marketing, you are building multiple different avenues to keep in contact with your clients. With an investment into online marketing, you can build email lists and social media accounts, which then will make for even more cost-efficient marketing in the future.
Q: How long does web marketing stay relevant?
A: It doesn’t look like the internet is going anywhere, so it’s safe to say that your online marketing approach will be relevant for years to come. By getting a head start on your online marketing, you’ll be able to get ahead of the curve and stay relevant for years to come.

About Search Engine Pros: Search Engine Pros is a Santa Barbara web marketing firm specialized in online marketing, SEO marketing, PPC (Pay Per Click Google Adwords) and SEO/web design. Visit the website and Facebook page or call 800-605-4988 for more information or to request a copy of 101 Ways to Drive Traffic.

Big budget results. Small budget costs.

Step 1. Design a site that captivates, informs and motivates customers to action.
Step 2. Develop a content publishing plan detailing specific steps to success.
Step 3. Delegate execution to a team with a strong track record for success.

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