Additionally, you can use Google Analytics to track data from your Site Search to help you improve your online marketing campaigns.  It’s not set up by default, but with just a little bit of work, you can get a bunch of great Site Search data from Google Analytics.

Find New Keyword Opportunities

By viewing the Search Terms report, you can get ideas of new terms to use in your SEO and PPC campaigns. If visitors are typing a particular keyword into your site search, they may be using that same keyword when they search in Google or Bing. If you see a lot of on-site searches for a keyword, you might want to try that word out in a pay per click campaign or add it to your list for SEO.

Get New Product Ideas

The Search Terms report in Google Analytics is a great place to research what your website visitors want, but you don’t offer. For example, a plastics supplier used this report to find out that a certain material was the single most searched keyword in their site search. It was a product they hadn’t previously offered for online sale. By adding it to their website, they can increase online sales and expand their product offering, making their site more valuable for users.

Improve Landing Pages

Whenever you see large numbers of searches, make sure you set the secondary dimension in Google Analytics to “Landing Page” to see which page visitors landed on when they typed in that keyword.

Now you can see which page visitors landed on for that keyword, and make adjustments to ensure visitors are getting to the best possible page of your website for that keyword.

Make Sure Visitors Can Find It

If users can’t see your Site Search, they probably won’t use it. Try testing the location of your site search to see if you can improve the user experience. For example, Freelin-Wade’s site search used to be below the fold, under the left navigation. In order to provide a better user experience, they moved it above the left navigation and saw a 77% increase in use of site search when it was above the fold!

It isn’t really about which is better – it’s about using them in the most effective way to make the most of every marketing dollar. Here are 5 ways you can use PPC and SEO together to get the best results:

1. Identify new opportunities for organic campaigns. You can cast a wide net with PPC advertising and see which terms perform well for your business. For example, one of our clients sells HDPE Pipe and other underground utility supplies. Although it wasn’t one of our original focus keywords for our organic campaign, it was one of the best performing paid terms for traffic and conversions. Now it’s part of our focus keywords and once organic visibility increases, we may be able to scale back on paying for that term.
2. Fill in the gaps on highly competitive terms. We all have our lists of keywords we want organic rankings for, and that’s great. The problem comes when the competition level is so high that we can’t justify the amount of time and effort it will take to get that organic ranking. PPC gives us another way to get traffic for that competitive keyword without all the work that organic involves. It’s critical to measure ROI, however: we don’t want to pay more for clicks than we can generate in profit.
3. Introduce new products. Organic traffic is great, but it can take the search engines days or weeks to index and rank our newest products. When we have a new, hot item, we can use PPC to get that initial traffic until organic positioning catches up.
4. Address seasonality. The industrial marketplace doesn’t always follow the standard holiday trends that B2C retailers do. There are still seasonal trends for some industries. For example, another client sells commercial pressure washers. Spring and summer, when there is a lot more outside cleaning to be done, are much busier than fall and winter. By allocating their PPC budget for pressure washer terms during this peak season, we can catch more of those searchers who are ready to buy.
5. Test landing pages. When redesigning landing pages or adding new product copy, it’s important to test how effective those changes are. The problem is when we don’t have high enough traffic levels to get statistically significant results in a short time. We can use PPC to send a relatively large amount of traffic in a short time. Now we don’t have to wait as long to check bounce rates and conversion rates to see if our changes have positive impact.

How are you using PPC and SEO in your online marketing?

All local and regional businesspeople interested in staying on top of the latest internet marketing trends and strategies are welcome to attend. Our Internet Marketing Workshops will be presented by members of the Ecreativeworks team, who will share their knowledge and experiences in the world of internet marketing to help you make the most of your company’s online presence.

Our first Free Internet Marketing Workshop will take place next Tuesday, September 13, and will continue for four more installments through December 6. The full schedule is as follows: 

• Tuesday, September 13: Facebook Basics for Your Business
• Wednesday, October 5: Google AdWords Workshop
• Thursday, October 27: Social Media Workshop
• Tuesday, November 8: Google Analytics & Measuring ROI
• Tuesday, December 6: Advanced SEO Tactics

All workshops will take place at our offices in Plymouth, Minnesota. Click here for further information and to sign up for any or all workshops that interest you. RSVPs are required, so don’t forget to complete the form on the page linked above. We hope to see you here!

Now, you ask:  “how do you know you can beat them?”.  To this I reply:  All of those negative comments about how they are running their SEO program or the lack of, we will make sure your site has all those elements to give your website the base to compete right out of the gate.  After that it is up to you to decide if you would like to take your site to the next level and hire a SEO expert to watch your site every month or hire in house to do the same.  But, I say: “you must have an ongoing SEO effort to get to the very top and stay there.”   I can give you the basics and a good foundation, but like any marketing, it needs to be an ongoing process that you invest time and money into to be successful.

Bottom line:  SEO is your best bet to beat out your competition, especially if you are a smaller company you have a great advantage as SEO requires agility–and most large firms do not have that ability.  So, do it your own or take my advice and hire a professional.

How I like to start out any SEO project is to get a good base list of Keyword phrases that are matched to a particular page of the navigation.  Usually this entails 1-3 focus phrases per page, which gets me to my famous analogy of the shotgun or rifle approach.  Not if I were hunting I would want the shotgun, because I can just start spraying bullets everywhere and hit everything in site.  On the other hand I look at your website as more of a competitive shooting range that I need to be able to hit a specific target to win big.  So when you are starting your website project we want to really focus our “sites” like a rifle at the target, pick a few keywords and kick some search engine butt with those.  After we get great rankngs and traffic we can then start to work on the longtail versions and get all the peripheral traffic.  If we go with the shotgun approach and spray keywords everywhere, we won’t have enough focus to tell the search engines what we intended each page to be about (bad idea and bad for rankings).

You see at this point we want the search engines to know exactly what we were intending on each and every page of  our site.  So picking a few keyword phrases for each page and giving them steroids (another analogy that one of my co-workers likes to use) is the ideal plan of attack.    After we have decided on those focus phrases and matched them to their respective pages, we can then be focused on our writing of content on said pages.  Hopefully this is all making sense to you–it is in my head anyway.  Sometimes things don’t make it to the paper as I see them in my head, which is why I have some great project managers that accompany me in most of my presentations with clients.   They have a great knack for translating my thoughts into words that make sense.

I am hopeful that after reading this, you will go back to your site to see if you are indeed focused on what you were really intending to accomplish with your website in relation to being found on the search engines.  I think that you will find the more focused your pages, the higher your ranking, which in turn will show higher traffic and that should translate into higher sales.   If that is your goal to make money, then woohoo we will have done what we wanted the day you decided to build that website.

So, for your company’s sake, get LinkedIn today. This may just be a great place to find leads, educate your customers, entice great future employees, gain credibility and much more. Not ready for social marketing? This will be a great first step and arguably the best one for any industrial small business.

Also, I would like to give a shout out to Reelseo.com for turning me onto this cool video–they posted this in their blog this week also. Thanks for the great post.

You can also check out our linked in page if you would like.  Feel free to poke around and see who we are, and if you like us, leave a recommendation.

1.  You are in the Industrial Market.  Right?

2.  You want to be found on the Search Engines (Google). Right?

3.  Now look at what is left:  Marketing, now that is really what you need.

Many independent small industrial job shops take a look a the title of the post and “freak out” immediately, when all they need to do is remember that what SEO ultimately means is Marketing—the Search Engine part is just the means to get that message to the end user.  So, my first piece of advice for those that are overwhelmed by all the acronyms and long titles we use in our industry is to:

1.  Forget about Social Media

2.  Forget Search Engines

3.  Forget the Internet

JUST FOCUS on MARKETING, I will say it again Marketing.   No mater where you want your message seen, heard or communicated there are three basic principles you need to know:

1.  Show Up  (speak where people will  hear your message, that will make you be found).

2.  Communicate  (clear, simple messages)

3.  Connect (respond to questions, help your customers with problems)

Now if you equate this to the internet, you will see how simple it becomes.  Show up & do your keyword research to be found in the search engines, write good content that is easy to read and understand, respond quickly to your forms on your site or have a great Q/A section to do this for you while they are still checking you out.   Your website can be a great source of information & sales opportunities, so get to work on showing up, communicating and connecting to your online customers.

For Tracking Visits from Email Campaigns:
Google Analytics URL Builder – this is great for tracking email campaigns, especially if you’ve bought an ad/link from a 3rd party. Email links show up as “direct traffic” in Google Analytics, so measuring the effectiveness of email campaigns are can be challenging.  You can use the URL Builder to help you create the link that be placed in the email, then you’ll be able to see all the traffic you get when someone clicks on that link and if any of those visits converted.

For Tracking Visits from Twitter:
Goo.gl  URL Shortener – this handy tool works great for social media like Twitter. Long URL’s can be troublesome for the 140 character limit in Twitter, especially if you want to have a detailed comment with it or you expect lots of re-tweeting. Paste in your long URL, click “Shorten” and voila, you’ve got a short URL for your Tweets. Then, log in to Goo.gl with your Google ID and you can see how often that short URL was clicked.

I am thankful for youtube that they are able to bring B2B videos to the entire world, so that they can be educated by the products they have to offer.  I am also thankful that they are owned by Google, thus bringing these videos to the SERP’s  and helping the rankings and conversion for many of my clients.

I am thankful for the social networking sites like facebook and linkedin as they are making our world smaller and smaller and easier for businesses to engage their customers online.  They have really become a part of our culture and everyday life.

I am also very thankful to the online SEO community that is very open and helpful to those that have questions on how to make their businesses successful in a world that is changing and growing every minute.  You not only help your clients, you love to educate anyone who will listen and that type of  peer to peer network is priceless.

So with a short and obvious plug for myself and my company, from Ecreativeworks.  I give Thanks for all of my clients and colleagues.

When you have thousands or tens-of-thousands of products, updating product pages can seem overwhelming. You wonder if all that detailed, and sometimes tedious, work will pay off. Try starting with some of your biggest sellers, and if providing more information increases your conversion rate and impacts your bottom line.

Need more reasons to update product pages? Here are just a few to consider:

• There are plenty of places to buy online. If you don’t give visitors what they need, someone else will, and you lose the sale.
• Detailed product information can help you gain visibility for long tail searches, and long tail searches often convert better than general searches.
• You can use product pages to cross sell other products you offer, or to up sell to more advanced models.
• Information from your product details is used for feeds to shopping comparison engines, another avenue to market your products.
• Product pages are where you can outshine your competitors and where distributors can get a leg up on other distributors that sell the same products.

Here are a few things that can spruce up your product pages:

• Detailed descriptions give you great SEO benefit in addition to highlighting features and benefits. Use headings and bulleted lists in descriptions to make them easy to scan.
• Video lets you demonstrate how a product works and show off important features.
• Larger and multiple view images shoppers “see” what they are buying.
• Product reviews from other customers help shoppers make informed decisions. Why not provide customer reviews that help to solidify those decisions?
• Comparison charts can give shoppers a quick way to decide between complex products.

When potential customers are ready to buy, they need certain information to solidify their decision to purchase from your site. Are you providing them with that information?