The BizGrowth office will be closed tomorrow for the Fourth of July.

We’ll be back next Monday.

We wish everyone a safe, fun July 4th weekend.

-The BizGrowth Team

Google has begun penalizing advertisers who have slow landing page load times by lowering their quality score in Google AdWords.

Advertisers looking to improve their quality scores and lower their minimum bids using Google AdWords now face an additional obstacle to achieving quality score perfection.

The Google Adwords team has announced that, effective immediately, the load time of a landing page will affect the quality score given to an AdWords campaign. This means that slow loading pages will be penalized with higher minimum bids whereas fast loading websites might see their minimum bid price decrease.

Google has implemented this change as a part of their “fast is better” way of thinking and aims to further improve the user experience by discouraging slow loading times.

Google has been providing information to advertisers about their landing page load times through the keyword analysis tool in AdWords since May of this year.

If you are experiencing slow load times for your landing pages, your problem may stem from one of the following issues:

• Multi-second meta refreshes

• Slow redirects

• Multiple redirects

• Interstitial pages

• Slow servers

• Large page size

Google has offered a number of suggestions on how to fix these problems here: Improving Landing Page Load Times.

By fixing these issues you can significantly increase your quality score and cause your minimum bid price to go down.

Do you need help with your Google AdWords campaign? BizGrowth Search Engine Solutions can help. Contact us today.

Handling a mere 9% of internet searches in the United States, Microsoft has a long way to go to catch up with Google’s 62% or even Yahoo’s 20% of the market. However, with a new program unveiled last month, Microsoft is hoping to narrow that gap.

The Live Search cashback account allows users to get some of their money back on everything they buy at hundreds of online retailers. Boasting rebates of between 2% and 30% Microsoft has already signed up hundreds of merchants for the program including eBay, Barnes & Noble, Overstock.com, Sears, Circuit City, The Home Depot, and Zappos.com.

To qualify for the rebates, users must sign up for a free account with Microsoft and perform their searches through a special website that lists every participating retailer. Users can alternatively use Microsoft’s Live Search page where participating merchants are marked with a gold coin. From there, users make purchases as normal and Microsoft takes care of the rest. Following a 60 day waiting period, members can opt to receive their refunds of $5 or more by check, PayPal or they can choose to have the money deposited into their online bank account.

For advertisers, Microsoft has attempted to make the deal more attractive by forgoing the pay per click structure used by Google and Yahoo. Instead the program will charge by the number of online sales generated. This allows companies to calculate the exact ROI for each product they list.

If you are interested in marketing your business with Microsoft’s Live Search Program BizGrowth Search Engine Solutions can help. Contact us today.

In their never ending quest to make online search both easier and more intuitive, Google has managed to come up with yet another way to make your search queries more relevant.

Announced recently, Google has significantly improved their algorithms to process the newest information much faster then previously possible. What this means to us regular searchers is a much more current search result that includes websites that were added yesterday, not last week.

Nowhere is this change more evident then with the related search suggestions feature. For those unfamiliar with these suggestions, Google will sometimes offer you alternative search terms that it feels may help you find what you are looking for. For instance, search for the ‘US Open’ and Google will offer you the related term ‘US Open 2008’, click on that and Google goes one step further with ‘US Open 2008 leaderboard’.

Thanks to its increased speed, Google will now update the related search suggestions at a much more rapid pace. This means that if the movie ‘Attack of The Killer Tomatoes’ was suddenly much more popular then the current ‘salmonella tomato scare’, then a search for ‘tomatoes’ might suggest the onscreen masterpiece instead of the health scare.

Google also claims to have teams of people manually working and experimenting to ensure that the related search suggestions feature returns the most relevant, user friendly results.

In 2005 BusinessWeek published a cover story titled “Blogs Will Change Your Business.” Blogs, according to the article, were to be the great equalizer that could give any employee a voice potentially more powerful then the entire public relations department. The authors further warned that your customers and competitors were already learning this blogging stuff and that those who didn’t start to blog would be left in the dust. They had no idea how right they were, or how many people would take notice.

The article was a sensation, attracting loads of visitors, tons of links, and even a few professors using the article as required reading. To this day performing a Google search for “blogs business” reveals that same old 2005 BusinessWeek cover story as the number one result. While most companies would give their right arm to have top ranking on a highly searched Google term, BusinessWeek had a problem; in the last three years the world of blogging has transformed beyond belief, and more problematic then that, social media had far outgrown the narrow confines of simple blogging.

So what’s a magazine to do to preserve the hits yet give relevant information? Update the article of course! “Social Media Will Change Your Business” is the new and improved version of the 2005 classic that has expanded its reach to encompass all of the new media that now dominates the internet as well as the fantastic changes to blogging itself.

Obviously a lot has changed in three years so to highlight the changes in the two articles, the June 2, 2008 issue of BusinessWeek features the article “Beyond Blogs” to fill us in on the three year progression into social media.

As it turns out, blogging wasn’t the only technology to come about and revolutionize the internet. In the past three years sites such as YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Facebook, and MySpace have come from nowhere and developed into dominant properties with millions of users and some major high-stake backers.

While only about one fourth of adults read a blog every month according to new a study by Forrester Research, many more people are excited to communicate virtually through networking sites, videos, pictures, and the million other ways that continue to spring up every day. This means that it is now up to companies not just to establish blogs, but also all sorts of social media to keep up with the Joneses so to speak.

One company that has thoroughly embraced this new social media is the British telecom company BT. Employees there are encouraged to keep up wikis that operate on the same technology as Wikipedia. However, instead of editing the Beatles encyclopedia entry so your name is next to Ringos’, their wiki lets employees post and edit on the site to “write software, map cell-phone base stations, [and] launch branding campaigns.” Everyone from senior engineers to interns has the same access to the site, and employees from around the world can access the wiki to collaborate on projects.

BT has also launched a Social Network in the hopes of bringing the “value of the water-cooler conversations” to the internet. J.P. Rangaswami who runs technology at BT says that the company now has the ability to “understand what these relationships are, how information and decision-making migrate. We see how people really work” This will allow them to pinpoint the people who will work well in teams as well as the people who are transmitting ideas throughout the company.

Best Buy is another company that has used social networks to great effect. Their Blue Shirt Nation network has more then 20,000 active participants and in a company with 60% turnover, the network boasts a turnover of only 8.5%. In addition, a promotional drive on the site helped persuade 40,000 employees to sign up for 401(k) retirement accounts.

The article warns that while these social networks are incredibly useful, the quieter employees could fall through the cracks while those who network, create buzz, and promote their brand surge ahead.

Even the blogging world, the lynchpin of the 2005 article has changed significantly and not followed predictions. Then they expected the old media sites to learn the tricks of the trade and be surrounded by small niche bloggers. However with the advent of “megablogs” with paid staff such as TechCrunch and GigaOm as well as aggregating sites like Techmeme and Digg, the old guard have been pushed aside in favor of these new blogging giants. In fact some of these new blogs arguably have more power then even large newspapers and magazines.

Read the 2005 article Blogs Will Change Your Business

Read the updated 2008 article Social Media Will Change Your Business

Read the June 2 cover story article Beyond Blogs

If your company is ready to get started with Blogging or Social Media BizGrowth Search Engine Solutions can help, click here to contact us.

The best way to maximize your marketing results is by testing various elements of your marketing to find out what works best. BizGrowth founder Brian Offenberger gives you an overview of how testing can help you boost profits while lowering costs.

To be able to effectively analyze how to get the best results and profits from your website, it is crucial that you understand what online testing is and why it should be a major part of your online marketing efforts.

You may have heard the joke about the business owner who said, “Half of my marketing is working real well……I just don’t know what half.” Testing will answer that precisely, so that you know exactly what is working and what is not, often in just a few hours. As a business owner, it’s important to understand that you are not your customer, so any attempts to figure out what they will respond to versus what they won’t are just guesswork. Testing removes all the guesswork and shows you in real numbers, in terms of traffic and dollars, what will get your prospects and customers to act.

So what is testing? Testing is changing of an element or elements of your marketing message, tactics, channels, design, pricing, promotional offers, etc. to determine what works best. Testing allows you to ‘do things wrong quickly’, and get rid of what doesn’t work before you waste a lot of your marketing dollars.

Why should you want to do this?

• Testing allows you to get the maximum return for the minimum investment, the ‘holy grail’ of all marketing.
• You can cut your losses quickly and get rid of ineffective marketing
• Learn what your prospects and customers are willing to pay for
• Gather marketing intelligence that can be applied to other sales channels

As with many things, there is good news and bad news with this. The bad news is that it takes a lot of trial and error to determine what works best; the good news is that when you determine what works best, what marketers call ‘the control’, you can use it successfully for years and years.

What Are The Things I Can Test?

There are many aspects of your marketing you can test online. You can test:

• Price points
• Promotional offers
• Website design
• Headlines and copy
• Email messages and subject lines

In the beginning of your testing, you want to test one variation at a time. For instance, you would have one landing page with one price point, and another one with a different price point and measure which has more conversions. Many people who test price points test with the regular price and a lower one, but experienced marketers know that testing the upper limit is more profitable! They keep testing higher pricing levels until orders start to drop off dramatically to determine the highest price with the corresponding higher margin and profits they can sell for.

Common Types Of Testing

The most common type of test is the A/B or split test, where one group gets a message, and the other gets a different message and you see which one gets better results. It’s important to test properly to get a relevant result! You can compare one price point against another, one headline against another, different ad copy, even the background color of the website; just make sure the comparisons are ‘apples to apples’.

Another method of testing is called ‘multivariate’ and as the name implies, in this test you are testing a combination of things at the same time.

Then there is ‘Taguchi’ testing, which is like a multivariate test on steroids.

You do not need to do all of these tests, for most people getting started the A/B split test is the easiest to perform and there is no guess work or interpretation that is involved. One thing works better, gets more sales, and you go with that one and discard the other. With the other types of tests, there is some subjectivity and interpretations as to which of the changes produced the better result.

How To Get Started With Testing

• Determine what part of your marketing you want to test
• Put the test online
• Begin testing with search engines, either organically or through paid search
• Use the FREE testing tools provided by the search engines

You want to use the search engines first because of a number of reasons:

• You get a consistent, and often predictable flow of traffic
• You can control how much money you spend on the test
• You get more and better marketing and customer data from this source than any other option
• You have the most control over the testing process.
• Once things work well with search engines, they will most likely work with all other methods.

Following the roll-out plan (below) in the order listed. The costs and risks, and the lack of measurability increase with each channel. This is the most important reason to start with search engines first. It’s cheap and measurable!

The Marketing Channels – Get It Right and Spread The Word

1. Search engine test
2. Search engine optimization of website (conversion optimization)
3. Other search engine advertising
4. Email promotions and newsletters
5. Blog tagging, podcasting, and other online channels
6. Affiliate marketing
7. Press releases
8. Direct mail
9. Print advertising
10. Other media (radio, TV)

I can’t stress this enough; start with search engines because it is least expensive and you get unambiguous results fast. Once you have success with the search engines, then expand your marketing efforts with these other channels using the same things that led to that success. Many marketing plans have been failures because people have started with the most expensive methods and have gone broke waiting for meaningful results.

Google is by far the most used search engine on the planet, and they provide serious analytic tool for FREE if you set up a Google account. The three most important tools they offer are:

• Google AdWords
• Google Optimizer
• Google Analytics

Numerous books and countless articles have been written on each of these Google tools. The more you learn, the more you will earn!

A Word About Statistical Validity

When I went to college, I had to take several courses on statistics and validity scores. Very complicated formulas that I won’t bore you with, but you do have to have some understanding about statistical validity or you can make the wrong conclusions and sabotage your efforts.

The most important rule is that you have to have enough data to make any valid determination of what your customers are ‘telling you’. For example you cannot make any real determination of results from 50 website visits. A test with only 50 people landing on your test sites is not nearly enough to draw any conclusions. You probably need several hundred before you can start to see the real patterns emerge. Some companies won’t make any conclusions from a test until they have thousands of pieces of data to interpret. Depending upon your traffic patterns, you could achieve this in a day or a month or more. The more data you have, the more relevant the results.

Google AdWords and Google Optimizer will help you to determine validity, but be careful, these are only basic tools.

If you need help setting up a testing program for your business, tell us how BizGrowth can help you.

I had the pleasure of conducting another webinar for SEMA yesterday. The title of the webinar was, “Ten Things You Can Do Today To Improve Your Website Results Tomorrow.”

Take a look at the presentation slides here.

Brian Offenberger, President of BizGrowth Search Engine Solutions will be speaking at the National Marketing Academy Workshop Wednesday, June 18 at the Sheraton Phoenix Airport Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona.

The workshop is from 7:30 am to 5:00pm, and Offenberger will be conducting the session ‘Paid Search and Local Markets’ from 2:45 – 4:15. The Search Engine and Internet Marketing Workshop is designed for business executives, marketers, and public relations executives who are trying to get an understanding of topics like search engine marketing, viral marketing, blogging, social media, and local search To find our how to register, click here.

The presentation focuses on how to get the most bang for your buck from the major paid search engines by choosing the right keywords, writing relevant ads and optimizing your landing pages. Offenberger will cover topics including tracking your users, pay per click campaigns, copywriting, how to begin a campaign, and using local search to target prospects in single geographic areas.

To register for this event at special low rates, contact the National Marketing Academy.

On Thursday, May 8th I was fortunate enough to conduct a webinar for the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA).

The webinar topic was “An Advanced Guide To High Search Engine Rankings” and was a follow up to the Beginners Guide To High Search Engine Rankings webinar I also conducted for SEMA.

You can access the slides to the presentation here.

Is Generating A FLOOD Of New Business And Dominating Your Marketplace Part Of Your Business Strategy? If So, You Need To Understand The Vital Importance Of Websites And Search Engine Marketing.

By Brian Offenberger

Here is a checklist of the 21 best reasons that your business needs to have a website if your primary goal is to generate new business and increase revenue and profit now and in the future.

Reason #1 - To be able to sell more products and services to prospects and customers – EVERYONE IS Online.
No matter if you sell to end users, suppliers, or distributors, these are your customers and the way they are going to look for you to buy from is on the internet. It doesn’t matter if your business is in one of America’s largest cities or small towns in the Midwest, your customers are online, and that is now how they search for almost everything they need. If you don’t have a website, you will miss a considerable piece of the pie.

Reason #2 - You are open for business 24/7, 365 days a year. Your website doesn’t call in sick, and prospects can learn about your business when it’s convenient for them, including nights, holidays, and weekends.
Do you ever look for a business during non-business hours? Of course, everyone does, and people often make their buying decisions during this time. If you don’t have a website, you aren’t even an option.

Reason #3 - Your website is your 21st Century marketing materials. No longer do you need to print expensive brochures and mailers to your audience, and it’s easy and inexpensive to change content at any time.
Direct mail and printing other marketing material is not only expensive, it’s often not targeted to exactly who is looking for your product or service. When someone lands on your website, they are looking for what you sell. This is your opportunity to engage them and establish contact with these prospects and turn them into clients and customers.

Reason # 4 - With a website, you can sell products and services directly to prospects and established customers.
Have you ever purchased something online? Ever requested more information from a company or to be contacted by one of their sales representatives? Of course you have! Your prospects and customers do too. With a website, you can make sales, generate leads and ring your register even when you are sleeping.

Reason # 5 - With a website, you can reach a GLOBAL audience.
People who may be moving into your area often use the internet to ‘scout’ providers for the services they will need in their new homes in your area. Vacationers often use the internet to find the very places they will spend their money while on vacation. If you sell a product that is used all over the world, there is no reason not to attract buyers from all over the globe. With a website set up to do eCommerce, people can buy your product in Japan as easily as in your hometown.

Reason # 6 - A website allows you to present a professional image.
A professional website is a sign of business credibility and reflects to the customer the image of a business.
Now that you understand that the internet is where a lot of your new customers are going to come from, the next thing you must do is establish credibility with your prospects. One of the great things about the internet is no matter how small a business you have, even if you run it out of your home, you can have a website and compete against the giants in any industry, and be a genuine player and competitor. There are no rules that prohibit you from competing with companies many times your size with huge marketing budgets and getting new business that in the past would have gone to them.

Cost no longer dictates the rules. If you have more creativity and marketing know how than the big boys, you will win a lot of business that years ago would have gone straight to them. The internet has leveled the playing field forever. Years ago if you needed office computers, you would have called IBM. Today, if you search office computers on the internet, there are hundreds of suppliers, some are small businesses that can and do effectively compete with big boys simply by having a well designed website.

Reason #7 – You can substantially lower your advertising costs spent on other marketing channels, especially print, radio and television.
The internet has made it possible for you to easily (and inexpensively) make and distribute your own audio and video commercial messages. In the old days, these were called “radio commercials” and “television commercials.” In the internet era they are called “podcasts” and “videocasts.” A car dealer, as an example, could make their own podcast, put it on their website each Saturday with an extremely aggressive price promotion and, after a period of time, will have conditioned their market to come to the website rather than turning to the radio or TV for the advertising information and value.

The point is that a website is a great holding place for audio, video and pictures and will continue to evolve as a message holder for audio and video ads.

Reason #8 - Your ability to gather information about your prospects and customers is greatly enhanced. Web analytics helps you determine needs, wants, and behavioral tendencies of the people you want to sell to.
There is so much information you can almost instantly view about the people who go to your website. The amount of business information you can get and use is historically unprecedented. For instance, just knowing what people who land on your website type into the search engine to find you is easily accessible and extremely important information you can use to increase sales and profit in online and offline channels.

Reason #9 - A website will become your sales force’s best friend.
They will be able to upload presentations, marketing collateral, and create online meetings. Best of all however, is that your website can be your lead generator if properly optimized, and can have your salespeople talking to people who have ‘raised their hand’ indicating they are interested in buying from you. This results in a much higher closing rate and lower turnover in your sales staff.

Reason #10 – A website can help you cut costs in your business and marketing budget.
A website enables customers and prospects to learn and interact with your company on their terms, and offers them an opportunity for answers without physically interacting with the personnel of your company. This reduced strain on resources enables you to operate more profitably and efficiently.

With a website you can also quickly and inexpensively make changes and see results in hours. Just a couple of years ago you might have spent weeks designing a direct mail piece, spend thousands on printing and postage, and had to wait a week before any results would show. With a website you can quickly and inexpensively make changes and see results in hours.

Most traditional form marketers see dramatically improved results with higher ROI through online marketing. Why? Because people turn to the internet for all aspects of their lives: news, information, shopping, research, entertainment, networking and more.

Reason #11 - Your website is the best place for you to test the viability of new products or services.
There is no cheaper and quicker way to test a new product or service than with your website. The feedback and measurements you can get will tell you in a very short time whether you have a winner on your hands or if you need to do more ‘tweaking’ to create a consistent seller.

Reason #12 - A website greatly enhances your ability to communicate with outside sales reps and dealer representatives.
You can easily create a ‘members only’ password protected section of your website with information, pricing charts, and other information for your sales force that is inaccessible to others. This enables your sales team to have immediate access to information from anywhere and is a highly efficient way for interaction with outside reps. Many companies incorporate a “employee access only” blog for a more intimate, frequent conversations and interactions with their team members.

Reason # 13 – Make your business information available to the public.
Your website becomes a valuable resource for the public, where you can display your business hours, key team members and managers, contact information, and even your annual report.

Reason # 14 - Websites help you be environmentally friendly.
Do you realize how much paper has been saved since most people only have electronic versions of documents and other information? Websites represent a true version of ‘green’ marketing, saving paper and other natural resources.

Reason # 15 - Your website is a place where you can release time sensitive material such as announcing a grand prize winner, a product recall, or maybe an outage of service.
The speed at which you can send ‘message to market’ is unprecedented and the website serves as the placeholder of such information.

Reason #16 -You can use your website to demonstrate your product or before and after photos of your service.
No matter what you sell, product or service, demonstrating it in use or “before and after” photos is helpful and persuasive. A carpet cleaner I know has dozens of “before and after” photos of carpeted rooms that show the dramatic transformation from filthy to brand new looking that are very persuasive and have had an equally dramatic result in the number of jobs booked on the internet. You can do this too.

Reason # 17 - Your website can have a great effect on improving customer service.
Do you find that customers who call your business frequently ask the same question? You can decrease those calls and enhance customer service with a ‘frequently asked questions’ area on your website. You can also provide customers access to marketing collateral and sales presentations, and even allow them schedule appointments for your sales or service departments.

Reason # 18 - A website is like passing out a business card to millions of people.
A website greatly enhances your ability to network and interact with you customers and prospects. It’s much like going to a networking meeting, you get to tell people what you do and this is how to reach me, but you can interact with thousands of people everyday instead of the same 10 or 20 once a week.

Reason #19 - Your website allows feedback from customers and prospects.
Unlike an advertisement in print, on radio or on television, your website ads allow your customers and prospects to provide feedback and analytics give us insights into user behavior. This is valuable marketing information that you can use to boost your business on many levels.

Reason # 20 - Your website can help you open new markets, either regionally, nationally, or internationally.
Your website acts as your interaction point in international markets so you don’t have to worry about mail, phone, and regulations systems in foreign countries. For companies with multiple overseas locations, a website presence allows offices to interact and spread knowledge, key events, and happenings. Want to open a new store in Peoria? Create related pages on your website, test them using paid search advertising to drive a consistent stream of traffic and watch results soar.

Reason # 21 - A website can provide 24 hour customer service.
You can see how all the fast food restaurants are offering extended hours and you can too without any added costs. Today, with businesses selling nationally or internationally, business is a 24/7 proposition, even though your office hours are not. People can interact with your website, generate leads and make purchases even when no one is in the office.

These are 21 great reasons you need to be represented with a website on the internet. There are probably more reasons as the internet and online marketing are an endlessly evolving process. You know you need to be there in order to compete now and in the future.

BizGrowth Search Engine Solutions can guide you through the process of establishing a website, or if you already have one, make it work harder for you and produce more revenue and profit than any other medium at your disposal.

Led by certified eMarketing professional Brian Offenberger from his Scottsdale, Arizona offices, he has shown companies big and small the benefits and tremendous ROI in using the internet to create leads and sales.

Tell BizGrowth Search Engine Solutions how we can help you.