2012 Nashville Business Journal Best in Business Awards Finalists

Local Search Masters is proud to be a finalist for the 2012 Nashville Business Journal Best in Business Awards in the “1-25 Employees” category.  Finalists for the award were chosen by a panel of judges, who took into account financial data like profitability and other metrics. The winners will be announced at an awards luncheon on April 19th at the Renaissance Nashville Hotel. Our congratulations to the other finalists as well, it’s an honor to be in such good company. If you’re in town we hope to see you there!

Internet Marketing: A Two-Way Street For Success

With less and less time on their hands, business owners are partnering with outside teams to help manage their various marketing efforts.  As a business owner, you want to make sure your annual investment in your outside marketing teams and their respective channels of marketing is providing you with the results you want. Here are a few ways that LSM recommends you measure the success of your Internet marketing team, and how to work with your team to keep costs low and margins high.

Your Internet marketing team should be focused on two goals – making you more money and creating a positive ROI for their retainer each month – but they can’t do this alone. If done correctly Internet marketing should be a team effort and a two way street for success. Let’s breakdown some examples:

Let’s use Google marketing as our case study. You can either pay to have your ads shown on Google for potentially valuable keyword phrases, or you can invest in a company to have your website show up organically on search engine results on searches determined to most likely be performed by your target audience. Your Internet marketing team can get in you right in front of your potential customer and track things like phone calls coming in from their work, the amount of traffic your website receives and where the traffic came from. The two things they can’t do are close leads they bring in for you (except in the case of an e commerce based business) or calculate exactly how much revenue they bring you annually.

Your Internet marketing team will look at the numbers they can control. They may report to you things like an increase in organic search result rankings, the flow of traffic on your website, AdWords traffic, lead form submissions and phone calls. What really matters though? The same thing that matters to all business owners - RESULTS. It is up to you as the business owner to set up clear metrics for measuring your incoming leads.

Start by categorizing your leads and placing them into a CRM system like Salesforce. Be sure that all of your incoming leads are tracked and labeled; what you can measure you can manage. However you receive leads, be sure to have a clearly defined process for categorizing where they came from. Each month you should audit your lead flow and determine which marketing avenues are successful. Knowing this will help you determine ROI and where you can best invest your marketing dollars.

Again – please, don’t keep this information to yourself! Be sure to communicate to your Internet marketing team each month what the exact revenue numbers are from your website and from their other work. If the numbers don’t look exactly as you’d like your team can change their strategy to help make the work more efficient. If it’s a good source of revenue you can expand your investment – if it doesn’t work out then at least you have a better understanding as to what  does and doesn’t work for your business.

All marketing should be focused on finding a return. Measure and communicate your level of return with your Internet marketing team and your Internet Marketing efforts will have a far greater chance for success.

Trevor Emerson

President/CEO Local Search Masters

Dispelling Some SEO Myths

Some people have incorrect impressions as to what works and what doesn’t work when optimizing a website for search. Sometimes it’s because the person hasn’t kept up with the world of SEO (example: people who still believe the meta keywords tag matters), other times it’s because they’ve been told false information from people trying to make a quick buck. Below are a few SEO myths we’d like to dismiss:

Content is king:

The content on your website is important, but content alone will not provide your site with quality organic search rankings on competitive searches. What is more important is how many quality websites link back to your site. The more credible places online that say your website is a great source of content for “xyz,” the more search engines will trust your website as a source of content for “xyz.” The more they trust you, the more inclined they’ll be inclined to rank your website higher for searches related to “xyz.”

Google AdWords affects your organic rankings:

It would make sense that Google would favor those companies paying money to advertise on their AdWords platform with higher organic rankings for their website. That is simply not true. Thousands of trials have been conducted on this very issue and none of them have shown any correlation between Google AdWords spending and organic rankings.

 Quantity of links matter:

This isn’t an arms race. If one site has 10,000 back links and another has 100, the site with 10,000 won’t necessarily rank higher. It’s the quality of links that matters most, not the quantity. If you have 10,000 links from sites with low PageRanks and little content – you will probably not outrank the website with 100 links from credible websites with high PageRanks and unique content. With Google all votes are not equal, which is a good thing!

Social media is critical for SEO:

Social media is important – it can help build your brand name, connect with your audience on a deeper level and showcase your expertise. But don’t think that Facebook likes, some Twitter tweets or a few shared posts is going to help your website rank higher organically for competitive keywords. Do you think that Google, which competes with Facebook for advertising dollars, is going to make Facebook an important factor in their search algorithm?

Regular updates are necessary for higher organic rankings:

This is something that was more true to say a few years ago. Look at some of the websites that rank well on competitive searches and you’ll see they haven’t been updated in awhile. The takeaway – don’t just add content and update your website for the sake of it – only update the website with meaningful, relevant content.

Have additional questions or thoughts? Feel free to contact Local Search Masters and we’ll be happy to discuss.

LSM Keyword Research Video

One of Local Search Masters’ top priorities this year has been to produce educational information on search engine optimization best practices. We’ve provided articles on SEO and social media in our monthly newsletters and we’ve presented to our local chamber of commerce on Local SEO best practices. With the help of a few excellent new interns from Vanderbilt University LSM is working to provide weekly educational videos on different search engine marketing topics. To kick it off the series Local Search Masters discuss keyword research – what tools to use and how to figure out what keywords you should work to rank your website for. Through meticulous keyword research, companies not only learn which terms and phrases to target with search engine optimization, but also learn more about their customers as a whole. Enjoy!

SEO Memes

In just over a month, our summer interns have become full-fledged SEO nerds.  We caught them making SEO memes, and thought we’d share some.  They even went as far as to immortalize SEO king Matt Cutts in a new meme!

Helpful Google Analytics Video

Today is the exciting release of our next video tutorial (on Blogger), this time about the Google Analytics feature that allows you to set goals and track conversions. With the incredible amount of data Google collects about traffic to your site, it can be hard to know what is important and what isn’t. Goals allow you to identify the objectives of your website, and then look at the data through that filter and see what is really working on your page. If you haven’t used the goal feature, you should check out this video that can walk you through setting up goals that will allow you to make well informed decisions about your website in the future.

10 Interesting Google Features

Google has a lot of fun and interesting features, many of which you probably don't know about.  Click the link for 10 of the more intriguing ones.

http://www.localsearchmasters.com/blog/10-fun-google-featuresoddities/