Internet Marketing Strategy

Traditional marketing agencies always develop a very detailed strategic plan based on market research before they begin writing copy or doing ay creative work. “Webmasters” are typically not trained in marketing and hence the web is full of sites that have weak “brochure ware content” that does not position the company well or engage the user. The days of that kind of BS are long gone. TV advertising is suffering because people want control of their experience and to be able to comment on the products and services they use. With such radical paradigm shifts happening in the marketing word, you had better devise a solid strategic internet making plan or you won’t be able to leverage the best practices of the many unique internet specific tactics available.

Due to increased competition, to get the full benefit of internet marketing, you can’t just dabble with meta tags / adding keywords and track the ranks. You have to engage visitors, track their behavior and monitor that your business goals are being properly defined and met. In order to make an impact long term, you need to assess how much content you have, how many people currently link to you and how you might fit into a number of social media sites. Only then you can chart a course of action for long-term success.

Marketing Mix

We make sure your web activities are part of your overall strategy. All advertising will increase traffic to your site, so if your site is weak or does not rank well or does not have similar concepts from other campaigns, you will lose conversions from offline media. Your website is the center of all marketing activities: PR, direct mail, ads, radio, tv, etc. We have ongoing partnerships with several ad agencies and act as a paid advisor in streamlining the convergence of internet based and traditional marketing activities.

Before you embark on the quest for higher rankings and more leads, you need a detailed plan.

At the core of strategy is building an engaging site

Google is said to track how many people click your links from the results pages, how long people stay on your site and how many people are bookmarking and talking about you across the web! So if people bail out quickly once when they get to your site, it affects your organic ranks. Long term, you need a site that looks great, engages visitors and has valuable content that people will naturally want to share with others. Whether you get traffic from pay-per-click or the free results, repeat visitors who are satisfied visitors make a big difference. The best way to build a bigger and better site is to start with knowing your current situation and developing an integrated strategy.

Compare yourself to top ranked sites or you won’t realize what you are up against

Initial Snapshot of Website Status:
(This also helps determine the existing status of a website in the search engines before work commences)

• Link Popularity Check / Backlink Analysis See below for details
• Outbound Link Check List of pages you link to (Citation)
• Internal Link Check (Sitemap, contextual, navigation links with anchor text etc.)
• Broken Link Check
• Competitive Analysis See below for details
• Amount of Indexed Pages (Size does matter and content is still king)
• Amount of Results In The Top 50 (are you showing up on the radar somehere?)
• Web Stats / Traffic Report (HTML, if you have a tracking device set up)
• Ranking Report (HTML) with analysis
• Your Google PageRank is an indication of what Google believes the "importance" of your page is. The main way to increase PageRank is to get links to your site and inner pages.
• Your Alexa Traffic Rank Alexa rates every web page based on the number of visitors to it and how long they stay. The lower the ranking, the better.
• Is your domain in the Yahoo Directory The Yahoo Directory is a large directory of sites in many categories. Being listed in this site may help you get traffic. Submitting to the Yahoo directory costs $299 per year.
• Is your domain in the DMOZ Open Directory
• Spider Analysis of home page and one inner page (HTML) (A simulation of how the search engine robots see your site)
• ADA Compliance check (HTML) The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires stores, restaurants and other businesses to provide access to people with mental and physical disabilities. SEO and making your website accessible to the disabled are very similar so checking for ADA compliance issues is a healthy pert of any SEO strategy. We check the home page as a test of overall performance.
• Website's Age with comparison analysis (It’s like asking someone how long they have been in business)
• Server Analysis Report on the websites hosted on your IP, with analysis. Porn and Gambling sites won’t help to be on your lock in real life, so why let them move down the hall? Think of Google as your Mom...)
• Title Tag Report Listing of your site's page titles
• Cache Checker Report which shows pages indexed/not indexed by Google
• Home Page File Size and amount of lines of code
• Domain Name Factors Redirects, Multiple domain issues, IP Funnel info.
• 404 page Check to see if it exists
• Robots.txt Check to see if it exists
• Spam Check (white on white text, hidden links)
• Duplicate Content Check

If your site is 30 pages and all the top ten sites for your favorite keywords are over 100 or 1000 pages, you have to take this into account when developing your sitemap and long term content development plan. If your site has 3 people linking to it and your competitors have hundreds or thousands of backlinks, you need to plan on aggressive link building and consider linkbait and social media marketing. Examples of linkbait can include free downloads, funny videos or blog posts, long list of detailed info .or outstanding articles. Knowing what your competitors are doing and how your site compares, is critical in defining a strategy that will bring your site to a level that is in line with sites in the top ten.

Make sure your content includes informative content and is broken into categories

The key to any SEO campaign is quality content that brands the company as an expert, increases the site size and generates back links. The strategy of content development should be based on thorough key phrase research in line with new and existing offerings. Items we check are below.

• Your existing URL/filename list(sitemap)
• Phrases Listed on Your Home Page (Spidered with software with density analysis)
• Current Call to Action Analysis
• Site Architecture Analysis (Issues that exist with site structure that can lead to anything from duplicate content problems to the inability to get pages indexed. Examples of items checked: presence of splash pages, use of frames, excessive inline code, lack of sitemap, server folder names, and technologies used, as well as url format / filename considerations.)
• Site Navigation Analysis (List of technical methods used for navigation and recommendations to improve keywords and categories of information from a conceptual and architectural viewpoint. CSS vs. Rollover buttons etc.)
• Interlinking Analysis (Shows if you are like Wikipedia with lots of anchor text in contextual links supporting key pages or do you have issues showing the search engines your layers of important content)
• Brief Usability Analysis (Points out any significant methods you use that make getting information from your site difficult)
• Source Code Analysis for spider blocking issues

Key Phrase Research

Key phrases are what people type into a search engine when they are looking for something on the Web. In the early days of the internet, these were often just one word and were therefore called "key words." Over time, linguistic patterns for search terms have changed and now people search via phrases and even sentences.

At McDougall Interactive, we have long been intrigued by the psychology of how and why people conduct internet searches. By delving deeply into the minds of your customers your customer’s on-site behaviors, we can identify the terms they will most likely use when searching for your products or services. This makes them far more likely to find you.

If you choose the wrong key phrases or ones that are overly competitive - unrealistic, your efforts will be wasted. That's why we spend a lot of time up front researching the exact terms that will work for you. We also use several of the best tools available to analyze what phrases most often get queried in the search engines.

* Key phrase research should be done every six months at minimum to ensure new terms for the latest trends and or products get addressed. New content should be added regularly to add a variety of terms that may not have been addressed in the first round of optimization that often focuses on the top 10-30 terms.

Examples of a term that gets almost no searches

Branded Technical Support

Another way of saying it that gets more searches

Outsourced Technical Support

An even higher level choice, if appropriate

Call Centers

Comprehensive Key Phrase Analysis

Include many rounds of revisions since this is the heart of search marketing
Multiple sources for gathering possible terms, i.e. competitor sites, all of your team members ideas
Your comments on what you want to rank for and why
Your competitors meta keyword lists (but don’t assume they are good lists)
Use multiple Keyword suggestion tools
Test Keywords in Google Adwords to see number of impressions and how well you convert
Target terms you convert well for in organic since organic ranks take so much effort

The main tools we use in our research:

www.keyworddiscovery.com
www.wordtracker.com
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

We then do several rounds of brainstorming and many hours of research between several methods to accumulate a set of high medium and low level terms that we can then target when we get to the on page adjustments phase. For now these are used to assess what opportunities exist for generating traffic and to start to make a map of your content, to see if you have landing pages to support the adding of keywords. In the on page adjustment phase we make an exact map of the terms we will be targeting (Phrases Per Page Map). In this document, we list the pages where the terms will go, as well as a list of suggested file names, title and meta tags, code adjustments etc. But before we get to that in phase two, we need to see the landscape and how you fit in.

Backlink Analysis

Google became famous largely due to how good it is at judging you based on your backlinks. Don’t overlook the extreme importance of this part of search marketing or underestimate the level of complexity in building solid links from topically related, quality sites. Years ago, you could trade (reciprocal) links but now, the options are not so simple. We have in house writers and link builders that know what links will generate the best ranks and develop content that generates authentic interest in you.

Typical Backlink Reports

What sites Google considers similar to yours and analysis
What sites Alexa considers similar to yours with analysis
A list of your backlinks with the anchor text and analysis
A summary of the anchor text used to link to your website with analysis
Yahoo's top 1000 backlinks to your website and the title tags of those pages with analysis

After gathering all of this data, business goals, keywords, competitive knowledge etc. a site strategy needs to be document and regularly referred to, ensuring that you stay on track. We also like to keep a log of all our best ideas from brainstorming sessions. We use www.basecamphq.com to keep all of our clients organized, since one of the keys to a successful campaign is having a wealth of data on which to base your actions.

Once your campaign is rolling, analytics and, to some degree, Ranking Reports will help us plan your next moves.