This is part nine of the Business Owner’s Guide to Internet Marketing. The other posts in the series are:

• Introduction
• Is Internet Marketing Right for My Business?
• What’s In a Website?
• Internet Marketing Opportunities
• Why Search is Powerful.
• How do Search Engines Work?
• What is SEO and What are Opportunities for Your Business?
• Pay Per Click Marketing and Opportunities for Your Business
• Relationship Driven Internet Marketing (this post)

Today we are going to focus on relationship driven internet marketing, simply meaning,  using internet tools to cultivate relationships with clients or potential customers. This is opposed to relying on search engines or paid advertisements to bring customers to your business.

Some prime examples of relationship driven internet marketing are email newsletters, Twitter and Facebook. Those three means of marketing can be powerful tools because they allow you to cultivate relationships with your customers in a personal way.  Email is the most widely used tool on the internet. Twitter and Facebook have become super popular in the last few years. With all of them, your customers have to choose to sign up for your emails, follow you on Twitter or friend/fan you on Facebook. Their choice to opt-in creates a personal connection and allows you to develop clients, not just customers.

Email Marketing

I have had probably about a dozen dentists and doctors through the years. Some have been family friends, others were just the ones my family had always used, and sometimes they were just the one the insurance would pay for. I felt comfortable to come and go as I pleased and switch whenever I felt like it.

This feeling lasted until my last dentist appointment. Why? The dentist set me up on their email newsletter. It comes on my birthday and tells me Happy Birthday. It comes every time I need a new teeth cleaning. It is impersonal, it has my name misspelled and most of the time I don’t even read it all. But it consistently reminds me of the dentist’s name and company and it makes me feel like I am personally connected to them, and that my business matters to them.

We are all looking for some place to belong, to feel like we are part of a community, and as simple as it may be, these emails that I get make me feel connected to the dentist as a client, not just a customers.

They also build familiarity with his brand.

Almost 1/3rd of Americans choose a business to purchase a product or service from based on their familiarity with the brand.

In the study by TMP on internet search and local businesses, they questioned participants “What factor caused you to choose the business you purchased a product or service from?” The different colors on the bar graph represent the different means people used to find information- General search (like Google), Internet Yellow Pages, local search pages, and overall. Across the board, outside of business location, the item that won people’s business the most was familiarity with the business. Almost 1/3rd of the participants in the survey identified familiarity with the business as the deciding factor in their choice.

How much more could this dentist have me hooked if he had spelled my name right, sent me updates from time to time on topics like “How to tell when your toothbrush needs to be changed,” or “How to choose the best toothpaste”?

The possibilities are endless here. Email Stat Center reports that in 2009 the ROI on email marketing for every dollar spent is $43.52.

Is email marketing right for every business? Probably not, but it does offer huge rewards to businesses who develop clients and invest the time to cultivate the program.

Twitter

Twitter offers many of the same rewards as email marketing as far as brand awareness and developing a personal relationship with a customer.

Some other benefits Twitter offers include

• Notifying customers of new products or specials
• Searching through Twitter to find people looking for your product or service
• Developing relationships with Twitter users in your zip code

But the bottom line is that Twitter allows you, like email marketing, to develop customers into clients through repeated, personal interaction.

Facebook

Facebook is another relationship-driven marketing tool. The interesting thing about Facebook is that it allows you to bridge into your customer’s friendship circles.  If a person chooses to “fan” your business, that choice gets sent out many of their friends and can be included when their friends go to add new friends.

Thus, win one fan on Facebook and you have an opportunity to get in front of all their friends and friends can see other friends who have become your fan.

Again, your market might vary on this, but if you are a local business it seems there are many powerful opportunities available through Facebook.

This wraps up our series on a Business Owner’s Guide to Internet Marketing. Hope it was helpful for you.

• Introduction
• Is Internet Marketing Right for My Business?
• What’s In a Website?
• Internet Marketing Opportunities
• Why Search is Powerful.
• How do Search Engines Work?
• What is SEO and What are Opportunities for Your Business?
• Pay Per Click Marketing and Opportunities for Your Business (this post)
• Relationship Driven Internet Marketing

Pay Per Click advertisements are ads that are included within search results or on various websites. The advertising company pays based on the number of web users who click the ad to find out more. Here are a couple of examples:

PPC Ads in Google Search Results:

Google Pay Per Click Ads Are Shaded in Yellow in the Image

PPC Ads on A Website:

Pay Per Click Content Ad

PPC Marketing is Highly Targeted

There are several things that make these type of ads powerful and effective:

• The cost a company pays per click varies depending on the industry and can be as low as $0.05 a click. The prices can scale up to even $30 a click for highly lucrative industries.
• The cost per click also varies based on the quality of your website. If you have a higher quality, more on-target website, your cost per click is cheaper.
• Ads can be micro-targeted in their message: if your company is running a special that week, your ads can show up almost instantly with the details of your sale.
• Ads can be micro-targeted in their position: they can be set to show up for a specific search term like “Dallas homebuilder” or set a bit broader they can show up for search terms related to “Dallas homebuilder” like “recommended homebuilders in Dallas” or “custom home in Dallas.”
• Ads can be targeted to the specific audience that you want to reach. For example, if you wanted to target viewers from the Dallas area only, who are reading the home and garden section of the New York Times on Sunday afternoon, you have the power to target that specific audience.

The other added benefit to PPC ads is that they can be monitored in such a way that you can see which ads are getting clicked at a higher rate than others, which ads actually convert to the action you are looking for and your ad campaign can be adjusted to what is working most effectively at reading your customers. You can also choose how much you want to spend on a given day and can adjust your budget at any time.

In the next post we will cover relationship driven internet marketing opportunities. Stay tuned for more!

Photo Attribute: Wili Hybrid

• Introduction
• Is Internet Marketing Right for My Business?
• What’s In a Website?
• Internet Marketing Opportunities
• Why Search is Powerful.
• How do Search Engines Work?
• What is SEO and What are Opportunities for Your Business? (This post)
• Pay Per Click Marketing and Opportunities for Your Business
• Relationship Driven Internet Marketing

To put it simply, search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of developing a website’s content, structure and relationships with other websites in order to increase the flow of quality traffic a website receives from search engines.

It is similar to a political campaign, carve out the issues you want to address, develop your method for presenting them and connect with potential voters.

When I was in high school, my friends and I took great pride in finding the most obscure, out of the way, hole-in-the-wall restaurants to eat lunch at. We wanted to eat at some place that could be found in a newspaper write up, on a radio ad or TV commercial, or one that other people had referred us to. We wanted to find places that no one knew about, but that served incredible food. One place we liked to frequent required us to park in a nondescript parking lot and make our way down a back alley to get to find the front door.

SEO is like taking that whole-in-the-wall restuarant that no one knows about and helping it change locations from the back alleyway where no one can find it, to a busy shopping center where thousands of lunch-hungry customers go everyday looking for some good food.

In a practical sense, search engines are trying to organize the internet. They have made known what types of criteria they are looking for in their process of ordering sites. Search engine optimization takes the criteria that search engines have said they are looking for (page titles, content, links etc.) and makes sure your website is strong and well developed in those areas.

If your website has been developed incorrectly, or in a haphazard manner in respect to what the search engines are looking for, then you risk missing out on all the potential customers search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing could send you.

Search Results Basics

Just to make sure it is clear what I am referring to, lets look at this image of the search results for the search “Dallas hotels”

Search Engine Results Page

The results shaded in light blue are part of Google’s local business listings, a group of businesses Google has identified as being hotels in Dallas, and ordered them according to the local business algorithm.

The results in green are part of Google’s organic results, the web pages Google feels like best answer the query “Dallas hotels”

The results in yellow are paid search advertisements, also know as PPC or Adwords, and these are companies that are paying Google for the opportunity to be listed when the query “Dallas hotels” is searched.

As we talk about SEO opportunities, we are only going to focus on the left hand side of the page, the organic side, where websites are ranked according to their relevance.

Position Matters

Percentage of Visits based on Search Results Position

It’s plain to see that where you company shows up in the search results makes a huge impact on the amount of visitors you will have from that one search query.

To make this very practical, lets look at the Dallas homebuilder industry.  A quick glance at the Dallas Homebuilder Association’s website, looks like it lists about 780 home builders in Dallas. Of those 780 only only about 14 show up on the first page of Google for a search “Dallas home builders” (10 in the local listings and only 4 actual homebuilders in organic results). They have put themselves in prime position to attract potential customers.

Let’s Do a Little Math to Show the Power of Rankings

Google estimates that there are 540 searches each month, even in our current economy, for the term “Dallas homebuilders.”

A phrase like Dallas home builders should actually convert pretty well for a website, because most people who would search “Dallas home builders” are looking for someone to actually build them a home. So lets say that 54 of those searchers actually turned into customers (this seems a pretty safe bet because the number of new home starts in quarter 1 of 2009 in Dallas?Fort Worth was 2394). So our conversion rate is about 10% between the number of visitors a website has with this query and the number of those visitors that become customers. Let us also assume that each home builder makes $15,000 in profit per home they build.

Rankings and Profits

Here is what the difference in ranking position in the search results would look like:
Now, that is a huge difference based on where a company shows up in the search results!

What Is Typically Included in an SEO Marketing Campaign?

All of this can vary from site to site, but typically SEO campaigns focus on a few common items:

1. Website URL: Obviously for both the customer and the search engine, www.danielhomebuilders.com gives a much clearer idea of what the website is about than www.daniel-i-build-it-now.biz. Most SEO campaigns will look at your current website URL and see if it is ideal for your goals. There does remain the tension between a descriptive URL (like dallasinternetmarketing.org) vs. a more branded approach (wikipedia or facebook), and the pros and cons of that must be looked at on a case by case basis.
2. Site Structure: Simply put, are your website’s pages ordered in such a way that the most important pages get the most attention? Do your page titles match your goal for that page? Is your content readable to a search engine spider? Is there anything that would be a hindrance to a search engine spider from navigating through your website (do you use flash, javascript, redirects, iframes etc.)
3. Content Targeting: Does the content of your website target potential opportunities your website has? For example if you are a Dallas homebuilder, does your content target important phrases for your business like “new homes in Dallas” or “custom Dallas homebuilder” so that you could potentially rank well for those phrases in the search results?
4. Keyword Research: What types of searches are customers in your niche using to find products and services like yours? Do they search more for “Dallas asbestos removal” or “asbestos removers in Dallas Texas.” By knowing the ways in which your customers are searching, you can better position your site to be found in those lucrative search results.
5. Relationship with Other Websites (AKA Link Building): We discussed in the last posts how search engines view links as votes, so we are going to need a plan to get some votes from other websites. No politician   in their right mind would simply say, “I think I would do a good job as a congressman from Texas,” and assume that was going to secure them a victory in the elections. No, they put together a strategy of how they are going to communicate and develop relationships in order to get votes. With a website it is much the same way. You can’t expect to succeed in increasing your business through search engine traffic without a plan as to how your website will develop relationships with other websites in order to get links.

What Are Your Business’s Opportunities?

Your opportunities will vary by market, your current company season and what your goals are. But it seems clear from the numbers, the companies that invest in search engine marketing can open up a world of opportunities for company growth and profit.

In the next post we will focus on Pay Per Click marketing campaigns.

Image Credit: eCitizen Tchao

• Introduction
• Is Internet Marketing Right for My Business?
• What’s In a Website?
• Internet Marketing Opportunities
• Why Search is Powerful.
• How do Search Engines Work?
• What is SEO and What are Opportunities for Your Business?
• Pay Per Click Marketing and Opportunities for Your Business
• Relationship Driven Internet Marketing

Have you ever wondered how Google, Yahoo or Bing orders their results? Or why do they order it in the way that they do? Like when I type in “Best hotel in Dallas”

How did Google decide “HotelRooms.com” was the best fit for this search? Or why did Yahoo choose BestValueHotelDallas.com? Why did Bing’s results only returned one actual hotel, the rest are websites listing hotels.

When you realize that studies show that the top result gets 42% of the traffic for that particular query, from a business perspective it becomes even more important to understand how search engines work.

How does a search engine gather information? Watch Out for Spiders!

The idea behind most search engines is this: A company like Google creates a computer program called a crawler or spider. This program “crawls” or “spiders” through the internet from website to website gathering information about the content of the website. The means through which it crawls are links from one website to another. It records this information in a database and a “search engine” then analyzes the information as needed when a user (you) asks for it.

You type in “Best Hotels in Dallas” and Google sends a query through their database of all the information their crawler has collected,  saying “Give me the best results for “10 Best Hotels in Dallas” and make it snappy!”

How does the search engine analyze and return information for searchers?

Each search engine has created their own formula, or algorithm, by which they have decided the most important factors for returning the most relevant website for the search query. Google has over 200 data points they analyze in returning search results. Some examples of things they look at include website address (URL), page titles, text on the page, how old is the website, and how many other websites link to this information.

Hold On, What’s A Link?

A link is a spot on a web page that references another spot on either the current web page or another web page. Here’s an example:

Example of Links

On the Wikipedia page about the Dallas Cowboys they reference a series of other websites (the official Cowboys website, ESPN website, Sports Illustrated etc.) and link to those pages, meaning, I can click on the words “Official website” and it will take me to the Cowboys official website.

Search engines use links as a reference point in evaluating the quality and relevance of websites/pages.  Search engines look at links like votes. Here, in the Search Engine’s eyes, Wikipedia has cast a vote for “DallasCowboys.com” by linking to it, as if Wikipedia is saying “Hey, this is a quality site about the Dallas Cowboys!”

Search Engines use the number of votes (links) a website has received from other sites as a measure of relevance. A website with 1000 other websites linking to it saying this website is about the Dallas Cowboys, makes a search engine feel like the site in question is not only about the Dallas Cowboys, but is a high quality website about the Dallas Cowboys, simply because so many other websites have referenced it, and thus is a good candidate to show in search resuls about Dallas Cowboys.

Now, for you sticklers, it is important to point out that search engines don’t actually count votes (links) from websites like Wikipedia, but that is for another topic.

The search engine’s goal is to return the most relevant, best results for any search query performed worldwide. If you search “10 best hotels in Dallas” they want to return to you the best websites that exist on the internet to answer that question ordered from most relevant to least relevant.

So, to take the example from above, Google would say that the HotelRooms.com page about Dallas hotels is the best answer for the search we performed.

That’s Nice, But Again, Why Does This Matter?

Good point. Just a reminder from our post about Is Internet Marketing Right for My Business? -

• 60% of local business searches now happen online
• 87% of consumers questioned in one survey had used the internet to research a product or a service before purchasing
• In 2007, over 600 billion dollars of commerce was influenced by the internet.

And a few more statistics to help prove the point:

• Searchers visit the first website listed in the search results 42% of the time
• The second result gets almost 12% of the visits.
• The third results about 8% of the time.

Simply put, it matters how search engines work because it is lucrative for your company. If your company can show up in the top of the results for searches related to the products and services you offer, then you will get more visitors to your website, and all things being equal, turn more of those visitors into customers.

Ok, Makes Sense. But What Can I Do About It?

We will cover that answer in the next post.

Photo Attribution: Jasmic

• Introduction
• Is Internet Marketing Right for My Business?
• What’s In a Website?
• Internet Marketing Opportunities
• Why Search is Powerful. (This Post)
• How do Search Engines Work?
• What is SEO and What are Opportunities for Your Business?
• Pay Per Click Marketing and Opportunities for Your Business
• Relationship Driven Internet Marketing

My father-in-law, who has his own business, told me one day about how he used to advertise in airline in-flight magazines. He knew that for every $x he spent on those advertisements, his return would be $20x. Now, that is a good ROI!

Unfortunately, those type of advertisements don’t offer the same ROI as they once did. David Shenk, in his 1997 book “Data Smog” said that in 1971 the average American saw 560 advertisements daily, in 1997 (and that was over a decade ago) the average American saw 3,000 advertising messages a day.

Whether these advertisements come on TV, radio, print or banner ads on they fall short of the power of search for two reasons:

1. There are an overabundance of these type of advertisements
2. They are hard to target

Overabundance of Advertisements

First, the overabundance is obvious. Watch an hour of television this evening, and then watch the same hour program after downloading it from iTunes without commercials. The difference is huge (it ends up decreasing the shows running time by about 20 minutes). When you watch an hour of TV, basically a third of it is advertisements.

How many of those do you remember and are influenced by?

Limited Targeting

Second they are hard to target. For example, I like the show “The Biggest Loser.” If I watch an hour of that, I will see ads for all sorts of topics that someone has paid money to play at that time, based on the demographic of Biggest Loser viewers. The same is true for magazines, newspapers etc. But no two viewers are alike, and while there may be some general commonalities in those people watching BL, there are a lot of ads coming in front of people that just aren’t interested.

Why Search is Different

Now, harnessing traffic through search engines is quite different. You can focus your marketing dollars on customers that are actually looking for your exact product or service.

When someone searches for “Interior Designer in Dallas, Texas”, and you are an interior designer in Dallas and you have invested your marketing budget to show up well in the search results, you have spent your advertising dollar only on people looking for your service, and not the thousands of other people who just glance over an ad in a Dallas magazine or newspaper.

It is essentially like you are sticking your hand out to greet the customer who just decided they needed your service, AND were in the mood to see what you offer.

Now that is smart marketing!

And search is one of the only marketing mediums that allows you to focus your efforts only on interested, high converting customers.

• Introduction
• Is Internet Marketing Right for My Business?
• What’s In a Website?
• Internet Marketing Opportunities (This Post)
• Why Search is Powerful.
• How do Search Engines Work?
• What is SEO and What are Opportunities for Your Business?
• Pay Per Click Marketing and Opportunities for Your Business
• Relationship Driven Internet Marketing

There are two basic categories into which most internet marketing campaigns falls into:

1. Search Related Internet Marketing
2. Relationship Related Internet Marketing

A search related internet marketing campaing involves harnessing the power of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to put your website in front of customers who are looking for your type of product. These searching customers don’t need to have previously known you, or any one else you know, they are simply looking for a supply to meet their demand.

The next four posts will cover topics related to search based internet marketing campaigns, focusing specifically on:

• Why search is powerful
• How search engines work
• Search Engine Optimization
• Pay Per Click Marketing

The second type of internet marketing campaigns are relationship driven. These still are looking to supply customer demand, but rather than using the channel of a search engine, this type of campaigns focus on relationships as the means of connection. The two types of relationship driven internet marketing campaigns we will cover are:

• Social media marketing (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• Email Marketing

We will get to those topics after we cover the search related topics.

• Introduction
• Is Internet Marketing Right for My Business? (This Entry)
• What’s In a Website?
• Internet Marketing Opportunities
• Why Search is Powerful.
• How do Search Engines Work?
• What is SEO and What are Opportunities for Your Business?
• Pay Per Click Marketing and Opportunities for Your Business
• Relationship Driven Internet Marketing

Recently I was talking with a friend about a website/marketing campaign we are putting together for a local home builder. For this particular homebuilder, he makes about $15,000 profit on each house he builds. I said, “So, if this website can send him x number of leads a month, and even if only one of those leads converts to a customer, then he could increase his profits $175,000 a year.”

My friend replied, “Sure, but do you really think people are googling trying to find local home builders?”

I had also had a similar type conversation with my father-in-law who owns his own business. We started talking about ways he could use the internet and marketing to get new clients. In the end his question boiled down to, “But do you think internet marketing is right for my niche and my business?”

Those experiences helped me see that a common question among business owners is surely, “Is internet marketing right for my business?”

In the end, you as the business owner have to make that decision for yourself. Here are some facts and figures that can help you answer that question for local business owners.

How Americans Use the Internet

A recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that approximately 72% of Americans use the Internet. That comes out to 220,000,000 people in the United States alone who are online.

Of those 72%, what activities are they engaged in online? Although other activities vary by generation, email and search are the two most popular activities online.

American Use of Internet By Generation and Activity

So we see that of the 72% of Americans that are online, across generations the second most popular activity is using the internet search mechanism, whether that be Google, Yahoo, Bing or another search engine. It is also important to note the percentages of each generation online as you think about your target market.

Of those searchers, what are they searching for?

American’s Search the Internet to Find Information About Local Businesses

In 2006, Hillary Schneider, one of the Senior Vice Presidents at Yahoo!, said, “Out of the 130 million monthly unique users of Yahoo last year, 116 million of them came to Yahoo with local intent.”

For the record, that is 89% of searchers were looking for something related to their own location.

Also in 2006, Nielsen and Web Visible conducted a survey that revealed:

• 74% of survey participants said they used search engines as one of their ways to find information about local businesses. Other answers were: Print Yellow Pages – 65%; Internet Yellow Pages – 50%; & Traditional newspapers- 44%. Percentages are greater than 100 because more than one answer was allowed.

In 2007, TMP Directional Marketing and comScore revealed:

• 60% of all local business searches now happen online.
• 86% of those surveyed have used the internet to find a local business.
• 78% use the internet more now to find local businesses than they did two years ago.

And here is perhaps the most staggering fact related to internet use and local business: Google, who sees behind all the millions and millions of searches and site selections people make, is actively altering search results to favor local results. For example, if you are sitting in Dallas right now and do a search for “groceries”, “sporting goods”, or  ”lawyer” the results you get will be tailored to your local location. If you were sitting in San Antonio, they would be based around local businesses in San Antonio. So Google, after watching the way people search and the results they choose world wide, has actively altered their ranking formula based on what people are really looking for, and that is for local business information. You can read more about this concept on the official Google blog.

American’s Search the Internet to Choose Products and Services:

How Americans Choose a Product or Service

Online means of gathering information are shaded in blue and yellow. The big takeaway from those statistics is that for every age demographic, the company website was used more than print advertising, more than actual physical company employees and more than the recommendations of friends and family in researching a product or service for purchase.

And just to be clear, what it seems customers want is to research online, buy offline.

Emarketer announced that in 2007, web influenced store sales amounted to $470.7 billion while pure ecommerce amounted to $136.4 billion dollars. Thus, internet research about products and services leads to offline action.

BIGresearch reported in its survey said that 87% of consumers questioned, had researched products online before making in store purchases.

So, Is Internet Marketing Right For Your Business?

We have seen that 60% of all local business searches happen online. So, if you are a local brick and mortar business, research shows people are looking for information about your business online.

The research also showed that people chose the company website as the number one source they turn to when trying make a decision about a product or service. Regardless of your industry, its clear that your company website is important in influencing customers to make an offline action.

As we wrap up, here are some industry specific statistics to help you decide what is best for your specific business:

Research by industry

(If this chart is a bit small to read, press Ctrl = and the font size will increase)

Across the industries listed, a company’s website, the communication of product and service information, and the ability to be found through search engines seems to play a significant role in the majority of consumer purchases across industry lines.