Category Archives: Search Engine Marketing
What does Redcow Marketing do for businesses?
It’s interesting to chat to a customer about what we do and why we are different to others out there in the market place.
Some people see us as SEO masters, or pay per click managers, while others think we are website designers. What is our point of difference and what makes us so much different from the others in the market is this critical point…”the end result”
This is what I mean…I try to explain it by starting off talking about what we aren’t, we aren’t just a search engine optimisation company, we are not a pay per click marketing company, we aren’t a web design team..what we are and what we do is utilise these things just mentioned but again…that’s not us either!
We are business analysts for your online business. We design strategies to help businesses grow online – full stop. How we go about doing this depends largely on where the client is in terms of its current website presence. Some clients might have a website already and want to grow, while others have no website and want to discover more customers. So back to how and what we do….
I see ourselves as marketers who are able to improve or build new business for people by designing web based models in business.
Our major offering is in the key skills of improvement. We, in a “nutshell”, design marketing programs around improvement. We design tests and conduct studies online that help us improve our clients online businesses (much like a business analyst does for any business of substance) – we in a sense become the marketing team/business analyst team that companies don’t have for their websites and let alone can generally afford. What we offer our customers is a full marketing team at a fraction of a cost that they would have to fork out if they wanted a team to grow their business.
Let me walk you through a campaign we did for a client just recently, maybe this will explain more about we do…The client wanted more sales from its current visitors.
- The client had a nice website already but was not happy with the level of bookings it generated
- We started this program but designed a strategy to help the client discover how to make its website more effective
- Unlike others who might do an improvement review on a website based on just “best practices”, we start off by finding out exactly what past clients thought of their website as well as discovering what new visitors thought of their online website model
- We then went about discovering how people surfed their online pages, where people clicked, how far people scrolled on pages, what keywords brought them to site pages, we recorded people using the website and also conducted a number of user case studies to help us discover weaknesses within their websites.
- After three months of testing and discovering we were able to increase the sites performance (in regards to sales generated) by an amazing 100%
So there you go, that’s just one way we help clients grow….
So, is it clear now what we offer? Maybe a little clearer??
“We help clients grow their business by designing strategies to suit their end goals”
Can this be packaged and sold in the 1000′s, I’m not so sure… but we are giving it go!
For our clients the ultimate growth can only happen once we understand the NEEDS and because each client is unique each marketing strategy therefore must be as well!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Quick steps to SEO greatness
I was working with a client of mine on a project and he happened to mention that his wife was working on a website project to help families become more interested in playing golf.
His wife had being working with an website agency to promote this service and the site has just gone live. He wanted to get this site promoted in search engines such as Google. He sent me the link and asked for my help.
I asked if he would be able to give me some search phrases that his wife would like the site to be found for. He come back the next day and give me five lines of phrases. Out of these five lines the words he gave were very generic and in most cases they were just one word. I then asked him to resend me a list of search phrases that were more specific to what the site was promoting. The next thing I know a page document was sent to me with the note; ‘please take the content for phrases from this document’.
Ok, I reviewed the document and was able to determine some key phrases to focus on and then went about briefing my friend on some ways to help the site get found.
Here were my tips:
- Come up with a load of keyword rich search terms you want to be found for.
- Add these to your home page content and then start building paragraphs of text around these, making sure the content and paragraphs stay within a structure that is still well written.
- Make a headline on the home page that indicates in one good headline what this site will provide to the end users…make the headline all about what’s in it for them and if possible include some keywords that will also help your rankings.
Then I asked him to check his <title tag>, this is an area that the spiders of search engines see and report on but not normally noticed by the average user that views a website page. His title should include these same keywords separated by commas to make it more readable for the search engine spiders.
The next tag to review was the <meta-description>. This is important for rankings and clicks in search engines because this is what people see in the search results when your site comes up. In this area it is a good idea to have a call to action and to summarise what the visitor will find on your site.
Armed with these quick tips you will be on your way to SEO greatness! Good luck!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
PPC vs SEO
There is a debate in the industry around the benefits of using pay-per-click (PPC) adverting instead of search engine optimisation (SEO) as your main source of website traffic. While I feel that there are many benefits of search engine optimisation to me as a business owner PPC can be rewarding in so many ways over SEO.
Here are some interesting points to be aware of;
- PPC traffic converts at 2.03% versus 1.26% for natural traffic
- PPC visitors spend about 10% more money on your site than naturally found visitors
- PPC visitors stay on your site 29% longer than naturally found website visitors
Here are my thoughts on why these stats are as they are
With PPC you control what phrases you want to appear in Google for, with natural search (SEO) you dont have the same control over these search queries. In some strange instances your site might be found for search phrases that are not related to your business at all but the search engines have tagged your website as having content relevant to this.
For example, you can state in PPC that you want to show for a phrase that directly relates to your product, for example “dog collars” and then when someone types in “looking for dog collars” your site comes up at the top of Google ready for that person to click, visit and then buy.
The reason I believe PPC visitors stay longer on your site is that they know what you have is what they have searched for and now want to know more about your website before making a commitment to buy from you. They are just checking you out more before they spend their cash with you…
The reason people spend more from you is an interesting one, is it because the PPC visitor is a more serious purchaser and hence has more to spend than the naturally found website visitor.
My final words, PPC gives you more control on who see’s your business online and where your business shows and doesn’t show. It typically gives your business an instant boost of traffic due to the fact that you can show in google today, tomorrow and the next day as long as you are willing to pay for the traffic you get. PCC also gives you the ability to test product prices, collect feedback and gather really quick information due to the ability to send alot of traffic to your site via PPC advertising. It’s all good food for thought…
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Use Google Optimiser to get more sales and customers
Knowing how to use Google Optimiser will guide you to more sales and customers.
I was looking into my Google stats for a client’s website last week and discovered a huge spike in people leaving their website on the products and services page. After further review I discovered that my client had decided to completely revamp their product and service content based on what others were telling them should be on that page. While making changes to your website can help you gain more sales it can also make you lose sales too.
With Google Optimiser you can set up various versions of a web page to see what impact a change has on the performance of your website. It’s a powerful free product that can allow you to test every tweak to your website to ensure you don’t get in the way of sales!
When using Google Optimiser consider these points:
- Don’t make any changes to your website content until you have tested one version over the next (old content versus new content).
- Look at split testing the changes to see what impact this has on your customers and sales generated before making the changed content the final version to go live with.
- Make sure you only make changes after you have reviewed your analytical data. Make changes based on what it is telling you works best.
- Don’t let bullies or the ones with the largest voice in your company make all the decisions on website content without first of all advising the reasons why.
Use Optimiser to help you refine and improve your sales and leads. Your business will grow from doing so!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
How to increase your CTR’s with AdWords
One method that I find useful to enhance you click rates in your AdWords is to make sure you have two ads running simultaneously for each keyword group you are running.
By default when you set up a campaign Google sets your campaign to show the ad with the highest click through rate by default which means you will never now how one ad compares with another.
In order to have the two ads displaying evenly go to the Settings tab as shown below.
Settings tab in Google AdWords
Then under the Advanced settings label click on the Ad Delivery option and then instead of leaving the Optimise for clicks select the option to Rotate and then click the Save button.
Advanced settings for rotating ads in your campaigns
Leave the two ads running for at least 100 clicks and then review to see which ad generates more clicks for you.
Once you have determined which ad is the winning ad, delete the loser and then create another ad that is similar to the winning ad from the previous test, then repeat the test cycle again. This should be done throughout the lifeline of your campaign management.
Without this you will never be able to gain the click through rates that you so desire. Onwards and upwards! Good luck and happy testing!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Target niche marketing for hotels
How hotels can target new clients for more business using the Internet.
Here are some tips I use to help hotels gain more customers, leads and sales using niche based sales & marketing:
- Analyse data from your website and look to see what keywords customers are using that find you in searches.
- Take these keywords and arrange them into small groups that are similar in nature.
- Take these keyword groups and think up a domain name that has these keywords in them.
- Purchase this domain name (or a variation of it if this domain name is unavailable). Buy the co.nz or the .co where possible.
- Set up website hosting for this domain name and then place on it content that is rich in keywords on this subject matter.
- Include testimonials from clients where possible to aid credibility, your key features and their benefits, and some photos and videos where possible to enhance the visual appearance and to help connect with the end user.
- Make sure your website page has great search engine practices included in it. Seek out an expert that can help or guide you.
- Look to advertise this subject in Google AdWords as another means to bring in targeted traffic, again bring in the experts to help you with this. Make sure you have set your goals up correctly.
- Set up Analytics so that you can track your return on investment. Best to set up conversions as well (so that you can track how many leads you are generating).
I hope this helps you!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Online marketing for car rental companies
Discover a marketing plan that grew a rental car business by 1800%.
The Internet is full of companies advertising themselves in search engines as the company to use when looking to rent a vehicle. Yes, it’s a crowded space, and many have gone down the slippery slope of competing for business by cutting their rental costs per day (especially within the car area) where the larger companies have thousands tied up in stock and must look to discounting just to empty the yard! It’s a competitive area and one that must be managed carefully if you want to make a splash. But there is hope, we have managed to find thousands of leads for our clients using our creative marketing models.
Here’s how…
I have been working with rental companies for around five years now and over this time we have tried many ways to find opportunities to grow businesses. We started off like most do, with a search engine strategy to ensure we had all of the ingredients in place for search engines so that they could be found by Google, Yahoo and MSN (now known as Bing).
The method in the early days was to optimise their website and display all products and offers, ensuring they had all their offers and specials at the time nicely placed on the home page. This method worked for a while but we ran out of home page space with these traditions and the sites just become a clutter both to manage and to surf around.
I can only imagine what site visitors thought at the time – we were just overloading them with offers for specials and deals for vans, cargo trucks, cars, people movers, minibuses etc, and it was not working to the levels we were happy with. We then thought we just needed more visitors to the site, so we started an advertising program using Google’s platform. We soon found out that having more people visit wasn’t the solution, the problem in fact was due to the confusion and clutter we had on the home page – people just could not see the woods for the trees!
The question now was, how can we increase our leads and sales without having a home page include all the information needed for each customer type? What we did then was create a new creative marketing model to direct these customers to sites that closely matched their requirements. We did this by using the models below all bundled up into a web strategy:
- Landing pages
- Sales pages
- Advertising with Google, Yahoo and Bing
- Search engine optimisation
- Website Optimiser
- Live support/chat
- Facebook profile & brand advertising
- Automated customer signup process.
Line chart showing growth for one of our clients.
The results not only spoke for themselves, they were almost too good to be true. This marketing method worked and we were able to track the progress of this business and over the course of four years build up the sales from the Internet.
If you would like to know how you can grow your rental company to the levels seen above please contact me using the details below.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
SEO for hotels
How to grow your hotel sales!
While the industry as a whole is a very competitive market there are some that stand out as innovative, creative, adaptable and brand focused. It may seem easy for some hotels that are smaller in size, but there are options for larger hotels to have these traits as well so that they can discover a long-tail of opportunities in the market place.
Over the past ten years I have worked with a number of hotels that were generating more room sales, selling more luxury based packages and exceeding the growth models that others were experiencing.
What I found was that all of these outstanding hotels were embracing the Internet and looking for opportunities and niches for themselves in this market space. One thing that particularly stood out for me was that these hotels were managed by people who wanted more sales from their own website, instead of leaving sales to a third party (all of which charged a very high commission model for each booking generated).
The ones that were growing were really utilising the Internet to drive customers to their own site, while others were just happy to take what they could get from their third party suppliers. Most of these hotels were not interested in rocking the boat with their supply chain – to them it was just easier to use this method of third party booking engines. My thought is that leaving it to a third party to bring in bookings is just crazy, but what can you say or do to change their minds? Obtaining more bookings from their own website to most owners or managers is in the ‘too hard basket’.
So, as I said above, the hotels growing in leaps and bounds had common traits and goals – they wanted more bookings from their own website, and at low or no commission rate.
Here is what I discovered most the successful hotels had in common between 2000 – 2009:
- They invested money into ensuring their website could be found in all major search engines.
- They used the Internet as a advertising platform to bring in more business.
- They had websites that made the process of booking online easy.
- They used an award winning booking system that was designed to blend directly into their website.
- They had invested in email marketing to send updates and special offers to all customers that had been to the hotel before.
Last year we saw a introduction of social media options like Twitter & Facebook and now many of the same hotels that succeeded back in the early 2000’s have rolled up their sleeves again with the intent to get value from these new models of interaction.
For me, social media interaction has an intangible return on investment. After all, it’s all about branding and keeping in touch with others through a medium that people use on a day-to-day basis. The value is blurred at best but the model is available and should be utilised to its fullest if you want to expand your brand awareness.
So lets look at the model from the early 2000′s again, now ask your self as a Hotelier, ‘what do I need to do to keep my business in growth mode though the economic times that we are in?’.
Here is my hit list for growing your hotel for 2011 (taking elements of the 2000 list as well):
- Invest money into ensuring your website can be found in all major search engines (use a specialised resource to ensure you keep in step with the latest tips).
- Use the Internet as a advertising platform to bring in more business – advertise not only in Google, but think Yahoo and Bing as well.
- Get your website into a new 2011 look and feel, look to engage users at the highest level. Make the site easy to navigate and keep the main focus and objectives in the website at all times (keep the booking engine in the design) so that people can book with ease.
- Use an award winning booking system that is designed to blend directly into your website.
- Make sure you utilise a company that specialises in web based booking systems as their major offering.
- Invested in email marketing to send updates and special offers to all customers
- Use the social media to brand and create more awareness of your product offers, use facebook as a medium to advertise offers to all followers.
- Use mini-websites to get in front of direct traffic and advertise these in all of your marketing materials, email signatures and printed business documents.
- Track all activity and report on your investments so that you can visually see if the return on investment is at a high level.
- Make sure your focus is on getting more visitors to your website(s) – the more bookings you get from your own site the more you will save – up to thousands on commissions that are charged by suppliers each and every year.
- Get in touch with a search marketing company that can help you reinvent yourself and your branded hotel with a sound strategy for more growth.
The way forward is simple: embrace the technologies available on the Internet; source experts that can offer you skills that your hotel does not have in-house; and focus on gaining more sales from your own front window.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Google Adwords
You can use Google AdWords to really grow your business. With a tailor-made account and with some highly skilled management your products and services can quickly be flying off the wall. This ability to get in front of people looking for your services locally and world-wide is just amazing. Having seen the growth myself in our customers, the value and growth can be phenomenal, but owner beware! It can be an expensive area to advertise in if you have the account set up on ‘show to all and spend it all Charlie!’
Here are some tips I have used over the years to help ensure you minimise the expense:
- Keep the keywords to a small number
- Make sure you keep the ads focused on a specific offering
- Keep a watchful eye on your daily budget
- Keep track on the number of conversions you are getting in return
- Last but not least make sure you only advertise to people who are looking for your precise product or service. For example if you sell red apples, be sure you are only targeting people that are after red apples…green apple lovers not wanted!
For more help and advice please contact me on the form next to this blog! Keep advertising!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Google Adwords marketing
Many business owners go ahead and build their own AdWord accounts only to find that they end up burning a hole in their wallet! What may seem easy to begin with soon becomes an impossible challenge, unsure what to do next most people continue to just burn money without really understanding if their account is working for them or not. There is a common misconception that you can add some keywords to your account, come up with an ad for your account and walk away. Here are some golden rules to follow when setting these accounts up.
- Use a professional, seek someone that spends their entire life in this space, it’s a highly skilled area
- Seek expert advise on how to manage this account
- Ask a vendor to manage this, the time and energy you save on having an expert look after this for you will benefit two-fold. It will generate more sales, with less cost per sale and you can guarantee that Google does not take your hard earned cash with ease
- If you can not afford a manager, at least ask an AdWord manager to help you set it up professionally for you.
If you need to discuss your account with me please drop me note anytime….
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Home page mistakes
Some tips to help you avoid pitfalls on your home page
- Don’t try to achieve too many objectives on your home page
- Make sure you start up a conversation with the visitor
- Don’t depend so much on multimedia to convey your message to the visitor
- Don’t turn that home page into a landing page. Your home page after all is there as a doorway into your house – use it to welcome people in and then tell them where they can find items within your home. The intent of the home page… is to get through to your other pages and not necessarily to sell them right there right now
- Don’t assume that best practices will work for your website. Look to test versions to see which home page brings in more value. If your website has enough traffic look to using the tools available to track where people are clicking and then determine what other items either might be of use or can be removed from the page.
- Last but not least… keep testing!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Optimising Google Ads
Use these techniques to ensure that your Google AdWords are performing to the max!
- Include your unique proposition either in the headline or the first line of your ad
- Make sure you compare your ads against your major competitors and look for ways to make yours more enticing
- Keep your mind on the keyword phrases you are targeting clicks for and make sure you have those in the AdWords
- Include a ‘call to action’ to ensure people take action and click your ad
- Include your keyword in your display URL
- Always have two ads running so that you can test one against the other
- And last but not least….keep testing, testing, testing!
Good luck!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
After better click-through-rates in your AdWords?
If you want to obtain more click through rates (CTR) in your AdWord account consider the following five quick actions:
- Limit the keywords you use in each adgroup to very small number of phrases
- Exclude your broad phrase usage (if the phrase is very competitive)
- Include the keyword phrase you are targeting in the headline of the AdWord
- Include the keyword phrase in the Display URL, eg: (.co.nz/keyword-phrase)
- When you begin advertising, go large with your cost per click budget limit to get the best position available and lower it once you have a good CTR.
Good Luck.
BTW: We are happy to review your current Google AdWords account and give you advice on ways to improve its structure to ensure your returns are maximised.
Cheers for now…
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
