KKom, Inc.

Serving Milwaukee's Web Marketing, Design, SEO, Social Media, Direct Mail and Color Printing needs for over 22 years

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engines are Changing + New Google App

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Google

Search engines are changing. SEO is not dead; it’s evolving with search. Google pushes updates out almost daily, and as the most advanced AI continues to learn and improve, the task of search engine optimization becomes more difficult. A few years ago, everyone could call themselves SEO experts, but those days are gone and with the changes comes the need to be better at marketing as a whole, which is not necessarily bad.

Search engines are forcing business owners and marketers to understand their target audiences at a deeper level than ever before, to answer tough questions that people want answered. If you can do that, your business will profit.

Thinking about the brand as a whole helps create a message that speaks to people in a more focused, and perhaps more human way.

What does it mean to think about brand as a whole?

What type of message and values do you want to be known for? Make this as clear as possible and find the best ways for your work to demonstrate this in a consistent way.

Consider the buyer’s journey:

  • Awareness: a prospect looks for a product or service based on their needs/wants. What kinds of questions are they asking themselves, and can you provide the answers?customer lifecycle
  • Consideration: they do some research and discover your brand and competitors, considering all the possible choices. Do you stand out in significant and positive ways in the marketplace?
  • Decision: they determine which choice best suits their needs and make the purchase. Did they choose you, and if not, what are your competitors doing better?
  • Customer Loyalty: depending on your business, this could be the most important part. Have the resources and preparedness to offer your customers support, answer questions, and do whatever it takes to ensure their experience is superior to any of the others they could get in the market?

On that note, search engines are looking for positive signals about your brand from other people. This includes testimonials, comments, questions being answered, your content being shared by other businesses or individuals, etc.

On another note, because search engines like to see positive signals about your business, it’s fair to say they do not like to see negative signals. This can include a variety of things, but one which has not been proven yet, is negative brand mentions on the web. There have been instances where businesses had something negative happen that resulted in bad press, and coincidentally their rankings were affected negatively shortly thereafter. So if you’re getting bad reviews, take the time to follow up with those people and take care of their issues or misunderstandings (even better if this can be done online for others to see).

GOOGLE UPDATE: an app called Bulletin is in the works, for the purpose of publishing hyper-local news and community-focused content where it can be easily found, including on Google search results. This could be beneficial for uncovering events and stories that miss local press coverage. Learn more here

What Types of Marketing Does My Business Need Part 3: SEO and SEM

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Continuing our journey through the various types of marketing available to you and your booming (or soon to be booming!) empire, we’ll now talk about the very valuable SEO – search engine optimization – and SEM – search engine marketing (also known as PPC or pay-per-click).

 

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

Stats

Google confirmed themselves what the top two search engine ranking factors are currently (as of 2016): content and links pointing to your site. These two things are big, important components of SEO, which makes SEO increasingly valuable to a business looking to be very successful in the digital realm.

According to research done by Ascend, 80% of companies feel like their SEO efforts are “above average”. As far as strategies behind SEO, 57% considered content creation as the most effective, but 48% also found this as the most difficult. 82% feel the effectiveness of SEO is increasing.

Benefits

By implementing a separate SEO program into your already existing business and marketing strategies, you put your company in a much more advantageous position compared to your competitors who may or may not already be doing these things. Appearing above these competitors, whether the names are already known or if they’re brand new businesses you weren’t even aware of, will give your potential customers a better first impression. As well, with expanded content focusing on, for example, educational material for customers, makes you not only very helpful, but also sets you up as an industry leader.

As content, keyword research, and link building (getting other websites to like your content so much that they share your link to it) continue to be the most valuable strategies, these also require a lot of time and effort, and 76% of companies surveyed claimed to use outside resources to achieve the results they’re looking for.

 

SEM – Search Engine Marketing

Stats

  • Google has a 40.5% share of the global mobile digital ad market (as of Dec. 2014) and a 31% share of the global digital ad market.
  • Click through rate on search ads were more than 3x higher than social and display ads (2016).
  • Interestingly 55% of users cannot identify the difference between paid search results ads vs. organic results.
  • Google earned an ad revenue of $63.11 billion in 2016, an increase of 19% over last year – they mainly earn this revenue by users clicking on these ads.

Benefits

While this approach is an investment, where you’re paying for ads vs. using the “free” organic ranking, this is very helpful to get a business off the ground, especially if the website is new or has never been optimized in the past for particular goals and themes. If you want instant results, this is the method that you will see instant results from. SEO is a gradual approach that will help strengthen your business in the long-term.

 

If you business is ready to take the next step in your web presence and to start seeing yourself on search engine results, contact K Kom for local Milwaukee SEO and SEM targeting, national, and even worldwide, and we will be glad to get you started!

“OK Google – SEO services Milwaukee!”
More stats from Google.

7 Reasons Why SEO is Important for Your Business

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Updated June 2018

Everyone is talking about SEO these days, also known as search engine optimization.

So what is SEO exactly?

It is the methodology of strategies, techniques, and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high rank in the search results page of a search engine like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

Some companies are full speed ahead with new staff, budgets, and the whole nine yards just for SEO, while some still are unsure of it’s benefits, or maybe don’t even know about it at all. While the following list certainly isn’t exhaustive, here are a few of the biggest reasons why SEO really is important for your business, down to your core goals and growth potential in this ever-changing world.

The Importance of SEO For Your Business

Potential New Customers Will Easily Find You

The majority of new customers will find you using Google or another search engine, which could include ecommerce like Amazon. Google in particular has set up rules (the “search algorithm”) which Google requires websites to follow, to ensure their own search clients are provided with the best search results possible. If your website violates these rules, your competitors who do follow them will show up on search results above you.

Increased Traffic – The First Page Is All That Matters

Search engine users are most likely to click on one of the top five results of the first page, and even if you rank highly on page two, few people travel that far! If you acquire ranking on the first page of some of your best keywords, the relevant traffic to your website will inevitably increase.

Ranking Well Translates to “Quality”

When you use good SEO practices, this includes improving your user’s experience and ease of site usability. As well, if your potential client finds you before your competitors, that might imply more industry authority on your part.

SEO Can Put You Ahead of Your Competitors

If you have some feisty competition offline, you can bet they are already utilizing the web to attract more business, and if they haven’t caught on yet, now is your chance to claim digital dominance! Many of these tough competitors will jump the gun and use paid advertising which appears above search results, but this is not free like SEO “organic” results.

Free Salesperson

When SEO is setup properly, it becomes a foundation for your bottom line. Think of it as a commission-free, 24/7 salesperson. What could be better?

SEO Is Not Going Away

According to ongoing research, SEO strategies are still effective and it’s not likely that this fact will be changing for the foreseeable future.

Google Needs SEO to Understand Pictures and Videos

The Google “bots” or “spiders” cannot view videos or see pictures the way we do (yet), so they still need some accurate text (alt tags) to tell them what they are. Many people skip this step, so if you do this well, your content will be ranking in Google images and videos in no time.

SEO Will Save You Money, and Make You Money

From a budget standpoint, PPC and paid social media advertising may be an important part of your strategy, but these cost money, not to mention the additional costs for managing these accounts. SEO will cost something to be initially set up and then managed, but the results are free, thus the additional revenue stream that develops is your ROI, and this becomes a solid ground in your online presence.

If your company’s website is in need of global, national, or local SEO services, we’d be glad to be part of your team to send you up the ranks of the search engines! Contact us or fill out our contact form and we’ll be in touch soon.

Milwaukee Search Engine Optimization here we come!