SEO is not overnight

March 6, 2015 by Social Butterfly

SEO – Search Engine Optimization does not happen overnight.

I mean think about it. If everyone could waive a magic SEO wand and make their site rank #1 for every keyword in their industry we would all be doing it. SEO is a long-term business strategy that will drive relevant traffic to your website in due time. I like to equate SEO to a garden. Plant some seeds, water them, nurture them and eventually you will have a garden ripe with crops!

So many of our clients ask us to help them rank “#1 in all the search engines for all industry related keywords.” That is a tall task! However, there is a lot that this company can do with your website to help you get there over time.

Read over the SEO insights below offered by Marketing Analyst Jerry Brown

1. SEO is NOT A Replacement for Poor Web Design
If your web designer doesn’t believe in SEO or at least have basic understanding of how rankings happen based on site structure and the ability for the bots to crawl your site, you need to run. Even if they don’t understand it, there are some basic things we used to charge for that is now done automatically through many great Content Management Systems.

2. SEO is NOT An Overnight Success
If you just built your web site last month or you are in danger of going out of business next month, I wouldn’t look to SEO to save you. SEO is a long term business strategy that will drive relevant traffic and can grow your bottom line… but it doesn’t happen overnight.

3. SEO is NOT Just On-site Optimization
Just adding some keywords to your homepage will help but that is a very, very small piece of the puzzle. There are many other things that we look at.

4. SEO is NOT Just About Google
What? Yes, it is true that Google is the 800 pound gorilla in the room. Ignore them and you will get crushed but it is important to remember that there are more ways to drive traffic to your site than just Google. Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and several other platforms have their own search rules and also play into Google’s results, so it is important to understand how you can optimize for these sites as well. For some of our customers, we see these sites as a top traffic generator.

5. SEO is NOT Magic
The one part science, one part art that was mentioned in my last article doesn’t include magic. If done properly and successfully, SEO is hard work. It takes time to research, it takes time to do the work, it takes time to analyze the results and it takes time to make adjustments.

6. SEO is NOT About Rankings Anymore
Years ago, rankings were important and were the way we could look to see if what we were doing was successful. Fortunately, the search engines have evolved and changed the way they work. Unfortunately, it makes it harder to look at one number to track results. With location, search history, the device you are using, and numerous other personalization factors being included in search, you will see different results from place to place, day to day, and person to person. The better guide is to look at traffic and conversions.

7. SEO is NOT Free
As I said in point #5, proper SEO takes lots of time. In today’s world, time truly is money. You can spend tons of time doing it yourself or pay someone to do it but it definitely isn’t free.

8. SEO is NOT a Total Solution but a Piece of Your Digital Strategy
SEO is a piece of your strategy that includes SEM (Search Engine Marketing), Social Media, Bookmarking sites, Blogging, Search Retargeting, and Video.

9. SEO is NOT Buying or Cheating Your Way to the Top
Gateway pages, link farms, stealing content, hiding words in the code, hiding words in the background, etc. These things are not SEO today. Run from anyone with the “easy secret” to top rankings.

10. SEO is NOT Finished – Ever
Everything on the web is changing all of the time. By the time you read this, I may have changed my mind about something in this article. Plus, your competition isn’t going to stop trying to get your traffic. Finally, you can always do better, get more traffic, or convert more visitors to leads or sales.

At the end of the day, SEO is a continuous process of improving your website’s ability to attract the right kind of visitor and then convince the visitor to do something. It involves site architecture and creating content that is good for both search engines and people while encouraging them to take some sort of action.

Let Social Scene Marketing LLC. put together a solid SEO strategy for your business. Be Social – send us an email and we will be happy to discuss ways we can help you drive more traffic, capture more leads, and help increase sales.

Google AdWords Tips

February 24, 2015 by Social Butterfly

Google AdWords Tips –

Running a Google AdWords account can get confusing…Lucky for everyone, Google is there for us as a resource.

Check out these Google Adwords Writing tips for terrific text ads…from the one and only…GOOGLE!

	Highlight what makes you unique Free shipping? Dazzling variety? Tell people! Showcase the products, services, or offers that make you competitive.
	Include prices, promotions, and exclusives People often use Google search to make a decision about something. Give them what they need to decide. If you have a limited-time discount or stock an exclusive product, say so.
	Empower customers to take action Are you selling something? Tell people what they can buy. Are you offering a service? Tell people how to contact you. Calls to action like purchase, call today, order, browse, sign up, or get a quote make clear what the next steps are.
	Include at least one of your keywords Keywords in your ad text show your ad’s relevance to what people want. For example, if you’ve included digital cameras as a keyword, your ad headline could be “Buy Digital Cameras.”
	Match your ad to your landing page Have a look at the page that you’re linking to from your ad (the landing page), and make sure that the promotions or products in your ad are included there. People might leave your website if they don’t find what they expect.
	Appeal to customers on mobile People seeing your ads on mobile are more likely to want to know where you are, or to call you. Show your location and phone number with location extensions and call extensions. Also, consider creating ads devoted to people on mobile devices, using the mobile version of your website as a landing page, and offering specials suited to a mobile audience. Keep in mind, your text ads can appear differently on mobile.
	Experiment Create three to four ads for each ad group, and use different messages for each to see which does the best. AdWords rotates ads automatically to show the best-performing ads more often. Learn more about ad rotation.

Still confused?!? Let us set up a Google AdWords Campaign for your business.

Brand Awareness

February 9, 2015 by Social Butterfly

Brand Awareness – Target #MoreMusic –

Aside from a few select performances, last night’s Grammy Awards were an absolute snooze. There are probably a few people out there that disagree as stats indicate that roughly 25.3 million viewers tuned into the popular music awards ceremony. While it was pretty cool to see music legends Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney perform, it wasn’t the music that caught our attention.

Target-America’s second largest retail chain- came up with one of the most brilliant brand awareness marketing campaigns we’ve witnessed to date. Instead of airing a regular 30 second commercial filled with Target products, they aired a 4 minute live performance by Imagine Dragons- a hip Rock and Roll band out of Las Vegas. Throughout the performance the Target logo was prominently displayed on the bottom of the TV screen along with the hashtag #MoreMusic.

The live “commercial” was an effort to promote a special edition of the new Imagine Dragons Smoke + Mirrors album available only at Target beginning Feb. 17th. Leading up to the live concert, the brand unleashed several rounds of digital promotion under the hashtag #MoreMusic via Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook.

Instead of bombarding people with another boring ad, Target was able to capitalize on their “music minded” audience. Our hat’s are off to the Digital Marketing team at Target! While an $8 million dollar marketing budget never hurts…we still think it was a genius idea for generating brand awareness in a unique way. BRAVO!

Let us come up with unique brand awareness campaigns for your business!

Build a Website

February 8, 2015 by Social Butterfly

Build a Website –

We were recently asked to build a website for a hair salon in Montgomery, Alabama called Hair Odyssey.

The owner and operator David Dandridge is reaaaaalllly good at cutting and coloring hair…but when it comes to technical stuff like building a website…well…let’s just say he asked for our help. Although he’s been in business for 27 years, he still lacked what we consider to be the#1 marketing tool for any business…a website.

We built him a fully responsive website using the BeautySpa WordPress Theme. Its sleek and simple design allowed us to build a website catered to everything he needs for his business. Step 1 -We worked together and came up with a few domain names. Initially he wanted hairodyssey.com. Well, it was taken + we decided it is actually really tough to spell the word odyssey. We wanted something easy to remember and after much deliberation we finally settled on hairmontgomery.com. Actually we secured 2 more web domains – hairsalonmontgomery.com and hairodysseymontgomery.com. Step 2 was to set up hosting (huh?…don’t worry about it we can help you!). And finally…the fun part…Step 3 – Build the website!

Let us custom build a website for you! Be social, send me an email and let’s talk business.

Retargeting

December 23, 2014 by Social Butterfly

Retargeting – aka Remarketing is a powerful thing!

It’s close to the holidays so I’ve been doing a lot of online shopping. I browse a lot of different products on several websites checking out all the deals on Amazon, Ebay, Best Buy, etc. When I finished browsing I decided to log into Facebook and upon doing so noticed several ads for the exact SAME products I had just viewed…

It must be magic…right?

Hell NO! That’s what Marketing professionals call retargeting or remarketing.

I’m a visual learner…so check out this picture on how it works:

60-70% of online shoppers abandon their shopping cart before completing a purchase…Why not use retargeting aka remarketing to lure them back in? Take a look some of Google’s reasons you should be using remarketing in your digital startegy.

Retargeting is basically targeting online ads directly to the people that have been to your website in the past. It is done through building a targeted list of visitors and displaying your ads to those specific users on different sites across the web.

Setting up a retargeting or remarketing campaign can be daunting…but that’s what we are here for!

Email Marketing – Generating a List

December 4, 2014 by Social Butterfly

Email Marketing –

If you aren’t in the email marketing game then you are missing out. Here’s a few quick stats on the subject:

You can’t send emails if you don’t have a list… So…How do you capture an email marketing list? What do you do once you have the list?

Well one of the easiest ways to generate a list is to give away something. For instance…you could offer the chance to win a prize package in exchange for making people sign up for your news letter. Pretty straight forward.

I’ve also heard of people paying to get a list. I don’t normally recommend this because the list is probably not very qualified. If you do pay for a list, make sure the list you receive are the type of people you want to market to.

There are several other ways to generate an email marketing list…

Let us help you grow your list and help with your email marketing strategy.

Responsive Web Design

November 5, 2014 by Social Butterfly

Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design is an approach at designing a website that focuses on optimal viewing experiences (easy reading and navigation with a minimum amount of re-sizing, panning, and scrolling ) across a wide range of devices such as mobile phones, iPads, desktops, laptops, tablets, etc.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that people are using all kinds of devices to search the web these days. Just take mobile phones…for instance…and think about its evolution over the past 10 years.

Here’s a fun fact regarding surfing the web on cell phones from PEW Research Internet Project:

As of May 2013,

63% of adult cell owners use their phones to go online.
34% of cell internet users go online mostly using their phones, and not using some other device such as a desktop or laptop computer.

Let’s take it a step further and look at some other mobile phone statistics:

As of January 2014:

90% of American adults have a cell phone
58% of American adults have a smartphone
42% of American adults own a tablet computer

So…What does this mean for your business?

Well you need to make sure your company website is responsive or easily view-able not only cell phones…but all devices!

How do you find out if your website uses responsive web design technology?

Click here and we’ll help you figure that out.

Gifs – Graphics Interchange Format

October 30, 2014 by Social Butterfly

Graphics Interchange Format-aka “Gifs”

Did this flashy Gif of Charles Bradley catch your eye?

How about this Gif of bass player Carl Dufresne?

What about this Gif of the lovely ladies jumping for joy?

Gifs are a great for grabbing peoples attention. In the Digital Marketing world, we use them to point people to a special or promotion and lead people to where they can give us their money. We use Gifs on websites, in email marketing, and anywhere we need to focus an audiences attention.

Let us help you insert Gifs into your website…so we can draw attention to your product and make you more money!

Making money gets me excited…like this Gif of 4 time Grammy winner / Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Buddy Guy.

Have questions? Be social…reach out!

Rich Media – What is it?

October 27, 2014 by Social Butterfly

Rich media is a Digital Marketing term for a website or webpage that uses “advanced technology” such as videos, video streaming, photos, photo galleries, etc.

Your website should be full of it! Unique content is best.

Photos are great of course! Go take a photo of something cool…like this:

Here's a shot I took of the Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica. — Here’s a shot I took of the Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica.

Ideally its something regarding your website or the product you are trying to market…And something “eye catching”…like this AWESOME 5 bedroom villa my clients Emma Spencer Living rent out in Guatemala. This photo makes me wish I was poolside with my wife and a cocktail.

People want a little more than just photos these days…so DEFINITELY embed videos into your site so people can learn more about your product or service. Or just be social and embed cool videos on your site…It will help with your bounce rate and ultimately keep people on your site longer. Not sure what the bounce rate is? Don’t worry about it..let us monitor it for you.

Here’s a video of an awesome band out of Telluride Colorado called The Great Funktier that I do a lot of Social Media Marketing for…not to mention sing and play the guitar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Eil3hPxfKU&feature=youtu.be

From a Digital Marketing standpoint…Google will start to notice the “Rich Media” and rank your website higher in search engines.

So the bottom line is…develop AWESOME, UNIQUE, content (Content is King of course) full of rich media…

Still don’t understand? Click here and let us do it for you.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization does not happen overnight.

Google AdWords Tips –

Check out these Google Adwords Writing tips for terrific text ads…from the one and only…GOOGLE!

Brand Awareness – Target #MoreMusic –

Build a Website –

Retargeting – aka Remarketing is a powerful thing!

Email Marketing –

Responsive Web Design

Social Media Marketing Tips!

Facebook Marketing Fact of the Day

OR

Graphics Interchange Format-aka “Gifs”