When it comes to business copywriting, many companies complete all of their writing in house. However, the problem with this is although many companies have good writers in their rank, often the tone just isn’t quite right. The worst part about this problem is that many companies don’t realise that they’re missing out on a good opportunity to really engage with their customers.

The right copy can help build your brand and increase your sales. It can change the way your company is perceived: you might use it to look professional, creative, or as good value. Many businesses think about their copy in a functional way. Instead of writing about what a product can do for a customer, they spend their time describing their product or services. This is one of the biggest mistakes that a business can make when it comes to their copywriting. (Continue reading…)

Creating web marketing campaigns first time around can be a little overwhelming. Perhaps the reason behind this is that there is too much information out there. Sometimes, it helps to go back to basics. If you are putting your first web marketing campaign together, here are 7 elements that you should consider.

1. Set your objectives

The first step in creating web marketing campaigns is to decide exactly what it is you are trying to achieve. While this seems a simple concept, it’s surprising how many companies jump into web marketing without a clear objective in mind. This can lead to you not achieving an optimum return on your investment. By keeping your campaign focused, you will get the best results for the lowest investment. (Continue reading…)

Long tail keywords are normally several words long, and they’re much more specific than shorter, broader keywords. For instance, a short keyword might be made up of one or two words, for example, ‘SEO Techniques’. A long tail version might be ‘Small Business SEO Techniques’ which is made up of four or five words.

These longer keywords have different purposes and advantages. Working them into your website copy can really help boost your traffic and online business in several ways. (Continue reading…)

Do you use intelligent web marketing? Good marketing doesn’t have to be extravagant and expensive, but should be highly effective. To make the most of the internet, you need to be smart with your marketing, and with your money.

By planning your campaign to make the most of the internet and related mediums you can see your business achieving even better results, but how to do start out and what makes up an intelligent web marketing campaign?

A well-planned campaign

Many businesses make the mistake of jumping in the deep end when it comes to web marketing. They spend thousands on pay-per-click ads, start blogs, get on Twitter, then wonder why they are seeing no results twelve months down the track. For a campaign to be effective, it needs to be well thought out and planned. Before you start promoting, you need to make a plan of what your campaign will consist of. To do this, you need to consider your goals, your audience, the mediums you intend to utilise and the messages you intend to put out there. (Continue reading…)

Utilising small business online marketing can return excellent results for a small investment. For many small businesses, budgets are tight and all marketing needs to be as effective as possible. One of the best ways to do this is to reach your potential clients online.

Why online marketing works for small business

One of the greatest benefits of online marketing is that it is cost effective. For a fraction of what you might spend using printed media such as advertisements, leaflets or direct mail, you can reach thousands more potential customers online. There is much you can do to promote your business that doesn’t cost a penny, and many campaigns that you only need to pay for on performance which means you can make your marketing budget go even further. (Continue reading…)

These eight essential SEO techniques will help you build more traffic to your website. They’re the basic ways to help the search engines notice your website so you can be ranked higher for more keywords. They don’t involve playing to every single change a search engine makes. Instead, they’re time-tested, proven ways to steadily gain ranking with search engines so your site gets noticed! (Continue reading…)

Image search engines are exactly what they say on the tin. They’re search engines for images. If you do a search on Google for a particular product or item, you can select to search for images only by clicking the images tab in the top left corner. When you search in this way, you’ll find hundreds of images of the product you’re looking for.

Images also appear in the standard natural search results too, usually just under the first natural search result. For Google, it’s all about relevance and offering information to the end user that’s relevant, for you, it’s another opportunity to get found by your potential customers.

How do you get found in the image results?

The only way to get found in the results pages of the image search engines is to ensure that you’re correctly using ‘ALT’ tags in your code. ‘But I can’t code’, I hear you say, that’s not a problem. You can check whether your ALT tags are correctly labelled by hovering over an image. If an ALT tag is present a little box will appear with some text. This text should clearly describe the content of the image, but more often than not, it will only say ‘image1′, ‘topimage’ or something similar. (Continue reading…)

Last week I talked about the Google keyword search tool and how it can provide you with a customised keyword list for your business, for free. Here, we’ll look at how to interpret that data and use it in your website and online marketing.

With the Google keyword search tool, you can learn several things about potential keywords for your website. By typing in a broad keyword, such as “jewellery”, you can see Google’s suggestions for related keywords. Each keyword will have several pieces of information about it.

For instance, you’ll see a column for competition. This gives you a small bar graph showing how much competition surrounds that keyword. If lots of websites use that particular keyword, the bar graph will be almost green. If not many sites use it, you’ll see more white. Hover over the bar chart and Google will tell you whether the competition is high, medium or low. Your goal is to find and use keywords with lower competition. (Continue reading…)

The Google keyword search tool is a free way to find keywords for your business. This is a simple and easy way to understand what your customers are searching for, rather than you simply selecting what you think your customers are searching for. It will help you ensure your keyword choice is more accurate for your customers and be better for search engine optimisation.

This particular tool allows you find keywords related to your business. So, if you owned a jewellery business, it would give you different jewellery related keywords. The data provided shows you the number of searches in a given month for each of the different generated keywords.

From the results Google gives you from the Google keyword search tool, you can select keywords that are relevant to your business offering, services or products. Your goal when choosing keywords is to pick those that are searched for frequently but that aren’t too competitive. For example, using a keyword such as “jewellery” for the content of a page is unlikely to get you to the top of the search engines. It’s so broad that there is bound to be limitless competition. (Continue reading…)