Orange County SEO™ Blog

The Role of Search Marketers in Sales

As a search marketer, you may not have thought about how much control you have over various aspects of your company’s marketing strategy.  Practically, however, you are in the driver’s seat.  You sell your creativity through your use of strategies with one goal in mind—to get more customers into the fold.  The better you are at this, the more credibility you have as a search marketer.  However, you cannot force customers to buy any more than you can force people to read your ads.

Instead, you persuade readers to buy based on the strategies you choose.  You hand off the customer to sales people who receive your product–a customer primed to buy based on what you have shown them.

Understanding your role in the entire sales process is key to doing your job well and having a ROI that stands up to scrutiny. Read More »

The Fancy Is The Newest “Hot Spot”

With a name like The Fancy, the more masculine among us may dismiss this newest hotspot as a “girly” site.  However, it is becoming the latest in a series of amalgamation websites to combine the best of some popular and climbing web interest sites—Pinterest, Love with Food, Groupon, and a host of others.  Best of all, the Fancy combines the best of these sites with a new and easy-to-use look that will draw buyers in and give higher conversion rates than the same bland and boring sites we have come to expect.

comScore’s article on the Fancy focuses on conversion from social media.  Likes are all well and good, but what happens when your likes do not translate into sales?  The Fancy can help you change that by providing that all-elusive marketing gold—a sales opportunity.  If your customers are buying, you are making money, and the Fancy proposes to give them every opportunity to do just that.

Orange County SEO can help you keep up with the latest trends in social media marketing and management by giving you up-to-the minute opportunities to grow your company through strategic marketing. Read More »

Semantic Searches Take on New Dimension

A “semantic search” is a term that has been in use for some time, but today’s semantic searches have different implications for SEO managers and webmasters.  This developing technology has a definite impact on targeted advertising, so it pays to brush up on your knowledge about the history and development of semantic technology as a part of your advertising strategy.

If you are interested in using semantic searches and other search engine optimization techniques, Orange County SEO can help with your goal.  We can help you utilize the very latest in strategies to make your web pages more marketable. Read More »

Second Tier Link Building

If you think that linking to pages that link to you is purely a spam concept, think again.  Second tier link building is a valid and useful concept if it is used correctly and you avoid the pitfalls that led so many websites to be punished for their “link wheel” approach when Google finally caught on to their tricks and decided to do something about link valuation.

In your Google Analytics, you should have a list of referrers that point back to your site.  Some are more valuable than others.  In fact, you could probably name a few that drive a great deal of business to your site.  We can call them “contributors” to distinguish them from websites that refer business to you only occasionally.

Your contributors have every right to send you business, and you have every right to capitalize on it.  How can you do this so that you do not trip alarms with the search engines that you are engaging in spam behavior? Read More »

Email Drives Sales, Not Social Media

With all the emphasis on social media marketing (SMM) and its place in the marketing world, there are those who will probably clutch their heads and howl if they are told that social media is not the driving force behind sales.  However, a new study from Forrester called “The Purchase Path of Online Buyers in 2012” says just that.  Instead of social media, the report found that the most effective tools driving sales are email marketing and search marketing.  Imagine the chaos that will ensue when this news hits the social media gurus!

This Can’t Be True, Can It?

There has been so much hype about social media that many people just will not believe this statement without hard numbers.  Forrester has thoughtfully put those together.

For repeat customers who bought with one touchpoint event, 13 percent were brought in by email marketing.  Another 20 percent were lured by direct website visits.  Even for two or more touchpoint visitors, 17 percent cited email as the originating factor of their visit.  For new customers, paid search mattered most in terms of initial draw.

You will notice that social media did not rank in the top of these numbers.  In fact, social media are not meaningful sales drivers according to the Forrester study. Read More »