What’s a Business to Do? Have a BAILOUT Sale!

October 8th, 2008

Every small business in America is feeling the pinch of the market meltdown and the credit crunch. Some business are worried about making payroll while lines of credit dry up. And consumers are clamping up their pocket books, and fast.

We in the search marketing industry are busy urging our clients to stick with their search engine marketing campaigns through this period. Too us it’s obvious that SEO and PPC marketing are providing the highest rates of return on their marketing dollars, but we still need to ease clients fears.

Click here to read the rest »

Posted in Local Internet Marketing | 3 Comments »

Wrong Marker Locations in Google Maps

September 24th, 2008

It was only a little while ago that Google switched its map data provider for the Google Maps service and already there are lots of reports of errors. Entire towns are missing in Alberta, streets missing in various locations, and oodles of reports of marker locations being off the mark by a few miles or more.

I just got word from a client today that their map marker had went awry. A customer of theirs had told them after trying to use Google Maps to find them. The marker was on the correct street, but over on the other end of town. After going into the Local Business Center control panel to try to edit their listing and move the marker I saw that inside the LBC it’s still pointing to the correct location on that map. Weird.

Click here to read the rest »

Posted in Local Internet Marketing | 3 Comments »

Hurricanes and Local Search

September 16th, 2008

As most know Houston and Galveston got rocked this past weekend by hurricane Ike. The aftermath has been rather devastating and a few days later over 1 million people are still without power. Many local businesses will be suffering for a while before things can get back to normal, while others will be experiencing a boom time (tree removal crews and arborists as well as window repair guys). There are also opportunities here for local businesses online.

I have a client in Houston and Ike will be meaning a slow down for them for a bit, but may lead to a pick up in maintenance work later on as the city recovers.

Click here to read the rest »

Posted in Local Internet Marketing | No Comments »

Working Remotely is Hard

August 28th, 2008

Being that I work from the internet I can, in theory, work from anywhere as long as I have an internet connection. And in testing that out right now I’m noticing some severe limitations. But it’s still good, just a lot to adapt too.

And I need a better laptop next time.

Distractions, Distractions

So I’m on a working vacation, so to speak, visiting family on the east coast. Lots of people want to spend some time with me, many of which are on their summer vacations and assume my working vacation is more vacation than work. On top of that there is lots I want to do to while I’m here and work takes a bit of a back seat at times.

This is my view from my “temporary office”;

Click here to read the rest »

Posted in Internet | 3 Comments »

Geo-Targeting AdWords PPC Campaigns : Part 2 - Keyword Targeting

August 21st, 2008

In my previous post I covered geo-targeting PPC ads by IP but mentioned that the IP tracking system has flaws that let some users fall through the cracks. Here we will be creating new ad campaigns that attempt to cover these searchers. We’ll also expand on the ideas to apply them to ad and landing page copy to help improve click through rates and conversions.

Geo-Targeting with Location Keywords

For all the ads you’ve created using IP targeting you want to create another set, without setting the location preferences, that uses the same ad copy and landing pages except your keyword list will be slightly different. Here you will add the city name or community name into all your keywords. So, keeping with our previous examples in Houston, “kitchen cabinets” becomes “houston kitchen cabinets” for the ad groups that are targeting Houston metro and “pasadena kitchen cabinets” for the ads that target the community within the metro area.
Click here to read the rest »

Posted in Local Internet Marketing, Pay Per Click | 13 Comments »