Inbound Marketing Blog by protocol 80

January 30

The 5 Best Questions When Hiring an SEO Provider

By Josh Curcio

SEO (search engine optimization) is not a luxury for your website, it's a necessity. The purpose of SEO is to generate traffic from search engines that can be converted to leads that can eventually be nurtured into a sale. If you look at SEO as only a means to generate website traffic and not help you achieve your overall business goals, you are doing it wrong. Some businesses might attempt SEO in house, while many others will look for an SEO provider to implement the strategy. It's clear that most business owners don't really know what SEO is, so how do you know if you are hiring the right SEO provider? Asking the wrong questions will just get you answers with a bunch of technical jargon that confuses you even more, asking the right questions will help you feel comfortable with your decisions!

January 20

Are You Focusing Too Much On Website Traffic?

By Donny Kemick

December 18

A Website Redesign Should Include These 4 Things

By Donny Kemick

If you are planning a website redesign in 2015 there are 4 areas you MUST include to ensure you get the outcome you're really after, more business. I shiny new look and feel will certainly help to build trust with your visitors when they arrive, but if you have no visitors to see it, what's the point? It's an absolute must to have as much focus on your efforts (think SEO, content marketing, social media, sponsored advertising) to get high quality traffic to your site as your efforts to make your site look better. 1 - A Blog In case you haven't heard... you have to be producing content if you want to get high quality traffic to your site. I'm not talking about people searching for your brand name, or people using local search to find a local supplier. I'm talking about new, high quality visitors that need what you provide and search for terms around your offering versus your brand name. That's how you grow your business. The absolute easiest way to generate content on a consistent ...

December 17

Inbound Marketing Priorities For The New Year

By Donny Kemick

The Holiday Season is here, full of end of year wrap-ups and final planning for the new year. If you are going into 2015 with an ineffective, brochureware website, fear not! I'm going to give you your top 5 priorities for the new year as a small business getting started with Inbound Marketing. 1 - Define Your Buyer Personas You already know on a broad level who your buyers are. They may be manufacturers that buy your components, or health care institutions that buy your supplies. Do you know them on a more micro level though? If you do, all of your marketing efforts will be easier. In general terms, Buyer Personas are the profiles of a company's ideal buyers based on market research current client data. Each profile is then turned into a fictional person that fits the behavioral characteristics of one of your buyers. This is not as simple as identifying their job title and company size. We're talking about identifying their demographics, buying patterns/habits, goals and motivations. ...

Why Rich Snippets are Important to Your Website

By Josh Curcio

I've gone through and read several articles about rich snippets and I'm fairly confident that 99.9% of business owners would be lost in reading those articles. My goal is to explain the importance of these rich snippets without getting too techie.

December 12

Improve Your SEO With Social Media

By Donny Kemick

If you're looking to improve your SEO, you might be surprised to hear that social media can really help. SEO is at the top of the list for most small businesses looking to grow their sales with the help of their website. They "get it". People use search engines, mostly Google, to find what they need. Whether it's a generation gap or a learning curve untraveled, most do not put social media quite so high on the list. If they knew how social media can help their search engine optimization efforts, they may change their minds. Social Media Leads To More Naturally Built Links If you've heard anything about SEO, you know that quality links to your content help to boost your ranks in search results. The key word there is QUALITY. Just any old link won't help. It has to be relevant. For example, if a spammer you hire places comments on a blog about a topic that has nothing to do with your industry, you won't see any benefit from it. In fact, it will be a detriment to your SEO because Google ...

December 04

What Aren't You Tracking On Your Website?

By Donny Kemick

If you aren't actively tracking metrics on your website, you aren't using the biggest advantage Inbound Marketing has to offer. Data is so abundant and freely available through tools like Google Analytics, MailChimp and HootSuite that you're not doing your job as a marketer if you aren't using it. Inbound Marketing isn't like traditional, interruption based marketing tactics such as radio, newspaper, TV and direct mail. You don't have to guess what's working and what isn't. The data is right there, in real time to see what Inbound tactics are getting you to your goals and which aren't. You don't have to wait for a new media buy to adjust. You don't have to reprint and remail to shift your course a bit. You can act on the data as nimbly and quickly as you'd like. If you're like most small businesses, you probably have Google Analytics setup to do basic tracking, but you haven't looked at it since you got the login information __ years ago. It's great that you have Google Analytics, but ...

November 19

Don't Disappear From Search Engines After a New Website Launch

By Josh Curcio

Getting a new website is an exciting thing! But what happens to your rankings in Google, Bing, and other search engines after you launch that new website?